Sanding bow

Since I started turning on a lathe, I've noticed a distinct loss of fingerprints when sanding. Mostly at the lower grits, I sure manage to heat up my fingers quick! I went looking for a solution and found the sanding bow. Who knew? Before someone starts with the whole "hold the sand paper with two hands so you don't press your fingers into the work"….yes, yes, you're right. But once I saw pics of a sanding bow I just kinda wanted one…you know, so I can sand and eat a sandwich at the same time or something. Anyway, after some study I pushed together some ideas and made this guy. It uses two slotted dowels, one forward and one rear, to friction wrap the paper so it stays in place and an elevating cap piece to apply tension.

The cap has a hex bolt epoxied in the bottom, which runs through a hole to a nut captured in a walnut dial.

Through trial and error I found 20" is the magic length for the 1" wide paper. This lets me get one full 360* rotation easily on each dowel and have just a bit of slack left, which is taken up by the elevation cap.

Built of a chunk of scrap maple I'd laminated together for another project. Finished with spray lacquer because it was easy. This one yields about +/- 8" of sanding area, which I've found also works very nicely for finishing round over work as well as on the lathe. I might build a bigger one at some point, but this one seems to be about right for right now!