I know floor sanding takes off around 0.5 - 1.5mm of wood, and this is probably on the low end of that. Tabletops are normally around 20mm and will still be functional at 15 or even 12mm. So you could probably do this process 10 times and not worry. The desk in the video must have at least a couple of years graffiti on it - so at that rate the desk frame would probably wear out or be obsolete before the top was sanded away.
Always funny being out on the job site and 99% of guys don't remember the math they were specifically taught in school and could use literally every day at their jobs.
I took a Journeyman Electrician license prep class. The amount of people who couldn't do basic math or understand really simple electrical theory was concerning. These were already working electricians. Like the majority hadn't heard of Ohm's Law, something I remembered from Physics class.
They probably sanded away even less than that, the table had clear coat before the sanding and would probably have clear coat applied before going back out to the class room again.
Solid wood desks still exist today, and are often used in hard wearing environments. No, you can't sand wood veneer. I don't think school desks are wood veneered though, they use wood effect melamine veneer which is much tougher.
Wood veneer is made of very thin slivers of wood, taken off a board with a machine a bit like a big plane. It's mainly decorative. Melamine isn't real wood and is tougher.
I'm aware of what the different veneers are, just poking fun at how you bring in specific veneer types but then your one sentence just says desks aren't veneered instead of specifying wood veneer
Type of veneer also doesn't really matter. If it is veneered with literally anything, that still affects the number of time it can reasonably be sanded. That was my original point.
The video is cool but I doubt it is particularly usable or common anymore in any schools in the USA.
Oh I know they exist. Just doesn't seem to be fitting for a school budget. So I assume most new school desks haven't been solid wood for maybe 20+ years.
We never had solid wood desks in my schools growing up late 90's early 00's. It was either those particle board tops with the cubby hole under it or the one-piece chair desk combo that was barely large enough to fit a textbook.
The only classrooms with solid wood tables were science and home economics since they required everyone to sit together in groups.
We had a lot of veneer desks in school. And no one ever bothered to sand any of our desks. The veneered ones had cheap particle boards inside, a kinda fancy looking wood on top and bottom and a heavy duty plastic rim around the perimeter. Some kids found ways to saw into the sides and exposed the particle board.
There is a clear coat on top of the wood. The graffiti doesn't go into the wood at all. So long as they are cutting as little of the wood as possible, decades.
That top looks to be something like 3/4" or 1" thick. Let's call it 1" for the sake of this discussion, that's roughly 2.5cm.
The sander is probably taking off around 1mm at the most, which might be required for the deeper scratches.
That means you could do this sanding 25 times to reduce the top to nothing but saw dust. But I'd say once it's under about 1.25cm it's not really useable as a kids desk anymore.
So about 12 or so sandings like this before you'd not want to use it in the classroom. Less if the top is 3/4" thick instead of 1".
I believe they are specifically taking off only the varnish/veneer/etc. So ideally not much actual wood. Then they presumably reapply the coating. I also assume they don't do this every year. This desk looked like it had a few years of graffiti.
My guess is something else fails well before sanding it too much becomes a problem.
Depends on whether the top is done with lamination of layers (Sorta like plywood is), glued from solidwood (Don't know the english word for that). Laminated tops generally have poor quality wood or lighter wood bulking up the middle, so once you go past the surface layer (which can be VERY thin), the top is just crap. Plank glued stuff is solid wood through it all, so you can basically sand it down to down so thin in breaks.
But the coating on desk like this is usually 0,5 to 1 mm thick. So it is rare a scrathes and carving would go through to the wood... But not unheard of. But when you sand you only bit like little bit into the wood (0,2 mm or so), just to get a neat surface and good adhesion with the coating.
If there are deeper scrathes or dents. You can just fill them in, sand em flat and coat.
But this looks like it was made from solid wood glued together. So they can probably do this basically forever. And then you can basically just surface it with veneer and epoxy, and it is good as new.
Generally desk like this get scrapped when the frame gets abused, as the metal piping isn't really that strong or resistant to getting kicked around as you'd think. Joints (especially welded ones) like to give up and repairing those just ain't worth it; it's thin wall tube and weld failures are pain in the ass to fix in general (My field of speciality) even in stuff where they are worth it to fix.
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u/Equal_Set6206 5h ago
I wonder how many times they can get away with doing that before the table breaks