Stripping 20 Year Old Awlgrip

[phorvati]

Its a ryobi random orbit sander, 5". I mistakenly called it palm sander. Its small so its taking a long time. I wish there was something with larger diameter and with a dust vent so that i can feed it into my shop vac.

[minaret]

Originally Posted by phorvati

Its a ryobi random orbit sander, 5". I mistakenly called it palm sander. Its small so its taking a long time. I wish there was something with larger diameter and with a dust vent so that i can feed it into my shop vac.

Unless your Ryobi is the right angle motor (not sure if Ryobi even makes one), it is probably fairly gutless. Try using a big right angle model like the one I linked too. Of course you can always go up to an 8" softpad sander setup, but then there's no random orbit and the learning curve goes way up. Unless you are experienced with that sort of tool I'd stick with a quality 5". In our yard I would expect this job to take two employees two full days, ie 32 man hours, tops, on an approx. 40 sail boat. And that's with 180. I would think you should be able to 60 grit off a hull pretty quick, as long as you have basics like decent scaffolding. If you just want to remove paint quickly and are planning on high build anyway, the soft pad could easily do the job in one day.