Shaping With a Sanding Disc

Shaping with a sanding disc is the stage where a drilled briar stummel is brought to its final form on a rotating abrasive disc. It is the part of pipemaking carried out without a cutting tool: material is removed not by the stroke of a blade but by how long and at what angle the wood is held against the disc. For this stage's place in the overall production flow, see the entry on how a pipe is made.

Disc Setup and Surface Speed

The setup is simple: abrasive paper is glued to a metal plate, and the plate sits on a spindle. Workshops use two mounting arrangements. In the first, the disc is fitted to a fixed-speed motor dedicated solely to this task; in the second, it is mounted on the lathe's tailstock, so the speed can be changed during the work. Benchtop combination belt-and-disc machines are considered poorly suited to this job, because the plate and its guard leave too little clearance to turn the stummel freely; the other half of that machine is covered in the entry on belt sanding.

The second factor determining the intensity of the abrasion is that the linear speed across the disc surface rises from center to edge. Even at a constant rotational speed, the area near the rim removes more material, while the area near the center is gentler. Which radius of the disc the stummel is held against therefore matters as much as the speed setting itself.