davee said:
I'd recommend looking at Granat before purchasing a bunch of Rubin. I have quite a lot of Rubin and am now preferring Granat. I find Granat lasts longer (although i think it rips more when sanding narrow material such as face frames).
After years of experience using Rubin and Brilliant 2 on raw wood, the second I could obtain enough Granat to start serious testing, we did so. All of the other 6 talented cabinet makers shared my reservations about Granat. As Festool users and fans all of us had been reading about Granat in the auto finishing field for years. An early concern for us and many woodworkers was the reputation of ceramic auto finishing abrasives to shed wax onto raw wood. That is like using a clear wax marker on an egg before dying. It rejects dye on an egg and many finishes on wood. So our first step was to sand scraps of the kinds of woods we routinely use, to 120 grit. We gave those samples to many of the finish contractors who do that for our wholesale clients. We asked the finishers to pay close attention to any voids in the finish and to stop when they appeared, so we could evaluate the situation.
To our delight none of the finishers reported any troubles.
It has been years since a client selected me to build traditional wide face frame cabinets for them. Maybe in my part of Southern California those are out of fashion, or they only consider me for the very narrow frames and European frameless for which I am best known. Fortunately the RO 90 DX I pre-ordered arrived about the same time as we started getting evaluation quantities of Granat. There was a couple of weeks delay getting my first 90mm hard pad.
While the finishers were taking their time doing the tests, all of us were gaining confidence using an RO 90 DX with a hard pad and Granat on especially narrow pads. For sure, there is a learning curve. It requires a lighter touch than robust Rubin.
The bottom line is that once we all gained Granat experience, we all prefer using the Granat. Our situation might be different than many cabinet makers in that we mill all of our hardwood from rough stock in our plant. Our "Face Frame & Door Guy" is fanatical about the knives on our Felder jointer and our Felder thickness planer, meaning we seldom are cleaning up tool marks. The light sanding is to provide a surface receptive to stains and/or clear finishes.
Almost always we do the manual RO 90 DX sanding prior to assembly, so we do not use the delta pad daily. I also have and love a Deltex DX93, which uses the same paper, but has less power. That is always ready to go in the frame sanding station.
Once we all gained Granat experience, we welcomed the thinner and more supple backing relative to Rubin. As we hoped, the extra working life of Granat for us saves time and money. We do each job faster with less frustration and fewer paper changes. Just the increased life of the paper more than makes up for the slightly higher unit purchase cost of Granat.
Over late spring and summer of 2011 we deliberately reduced our inventory of Rubin and Brilliant 2. The Festool Sander and Paper deal of last fall let me buy so much Granat that the savings paid for my November class in Henderson with enough left for 2 more classes so long as only one trip is required.
All 7 of us in my shop earn our living doing this, and we do not try to do every sort of woodworking, even cabinet making. So, please take this as our collective experience. It well could be that those who do not need the amount of abrasives we use might like to stick with Brilliant 2 and Rubin, remembering that Robin 2 will be in the hands of European woodworker any day now.
