Sanding is never fun. Not only is it laborious, it can get very difficult once you finish all the outer parts and move on to tight areas, such as corners, angles and grooves. The Quirky Sandables look to help out on that last part.
As you can tell from the name, this is another offbeat creation from crowdsourced site Quirky. It’s, basically, a sander in a sort of Play-doh form, allowing you to shape it into whatever form factor you need to smoothen out the tight spots in your weekend woodworking projects. You can even shape it to have a hole in the middle, so you can attach a long rod for sanding areas out of arm’s reach.
The Quirky Sandables consist of three types of moldable sanders, each one with a different level of grit. Made from polycaprolactone (PCL), it can be molded to form unusual shapes to fit any tight spot as necessary — just leave it in the microwave for three minutes and it becomes amiable to casting into another form. By default, it’s shaped similar to a protractor, which, on its own, should allow plenty of common sanding tasks without any need for further rework.
According to the Quirky product page, it has endless reusability, which gives it a heck of a lot more long-term use compared to the stack of sandpaper you bought from Home Depot. While “endless reusability” is probably a stretch (everything gets dulled eventually), it’s definitely a better option than whatever else is out there (short of hiring someone else to do the sanding job, of course).
As of now, the Sandables is still in the process of being fully developed at Quirky. You can learn more about it and participate in the link below.