I have a piece of 4×4 with a very uneven cut at the end, and I want to make this end nice and flat.
However, I am puzzled that there seem to be no popular tools for flat wood grinding. Sanding seems to be the obvious choice – but what if we need to grind down as much as 1/4" of wood, or more? I have a small Black&Decker sander, and while it works well making smooths surfaces, I'm afraid it's going to take me quite a while to sand away all that extra wood.
I also have an angle grinder, and while I initially thought that this should be an ideal tool for wood flattening, I'm surprised with the dearth of appropriate blades.
I've seen only a few blades on internet that seem appropriate – flat disks for wood grinding (with blades, not sandpaper), but have no idea how good they would be for my purpose.
If I had a large surface to grind down, a plane would be an obvious choice, but a 4×4 end should be too small for any plane.
Or should I just arm myself with some low-grit sandpaper and patience?
An update: I ended up doing this job using a sander with 40 grit sandpaper. It took a lot of time, but came out nicely. Thanks everybody!
Best Answer
Do you have a saw? Any sort of saw, be it hand saw, circular saw, hand or power miter box. These are all appropriate tools for squaring up an end like this. Even a jig-saw with a long enough blade should get you a cut that's close enough to finish sand.
An angle grinder would not be a good tool for this, which is probably why you're not finding any wood cutting blades. Usually an angle grinder is not a woodworking tool. You can use it, but you'll end up burning the wood with a grinding disk, and probably with a standard cutting disk, too.
You can use a hand plane, though planing end-grain is very difficult and requires a very sharp blade and proper setup of the plane (check out the Woodworking sister site for plane setup details - I know there have been questions about that there). If you don't already have one, you're going to spend more money, time and frustration trying to get this setup than it's really worth, especially if you expect this to be a one-off situation.
You could also just use your sander with something like 36 grit paper. You'd be surprised how quickly that will chew away wood. Get close to your finish line with the 36 grit, then switch to something like 80 or 100 grit to get really close, then switch to a higher grit if you want/need a finer finish, or just finish it up with the 80 or 100.