Cleaning scales

[Randy Griffin 68]

My sandpaper is leaving a grey residue on my wood. I have cheapo from Amazon and I have 3M. It’s not noticeable on darker wood but I’m using some hard maple and it’s turning the wood grey. I tried alcohol and it helped but didn’t clean all of it off. Y’all got any tricks?

[Alan Longmire 3,783]

#0000 steel wool tends to remove stuff from the pores, but if it's the cheap stuff leaving the residue, I'd save it for dark wood only and use the good stuff on the maple.  If they're both leaving gunk, I don't know what to tell you.  What grits?

 

You can also try floating it out in acetone, but that risks pushing it deeper into the wood.  

[Randy Griffin 68]

The cheapo and 3M does it. Mostly the higher grits like 500 up. 220 does a little but not nearly as bad. It’s worse on the edges of the scales where I’m sanding wood and metal. Going to try the steel wool.

[Alan Longmire 3,783]

I get that when I sand maple that has silver inlays.  The wool usually cleans it right off.  I use both the regular hardware store #0000 and, for final cleanup, Liburon brand #0000.  It's about twice again finer than the hardware store stuff.  Hard to believe they're both called #0000.

[Randy Griffin 68]

The 0000 steel wool worked great. The problem was the fine sand dust coming off the tang. Steel wool is not hard enough to cut the steel so it just cleaned the wood.

Thanks Alan.