The clips that clamp on the 1/4 sheet of sandpaper are very flimsy and broke within 2 months of owning this thing.
Reviewed by SulSaw December 31, 2008
I happened to pick up this sander after another more expensive sander I was looking at the time didn’t come with a dust collection adaptor that would fit my shop vac and the necessary adaptor wasn’t carried in the store. Having the need to finished some doors that day and indoors, I decided to purchase the Ryobi instead since it's dust port fit my vac.
This a pretty basic palm finish sander, it features no variable speed , but comes with basic dust collection, a rubber overmold palm grip and an on/off slide switch located on both sides of the sander.
When performing basic finish sanding tasks this sander performs pretty well, the motor provides a sufficient amount of power to complete the task and vibration is kept to an acceptable level.
Loading and changing sheets is pretty straight forward and the clamps do a pretty good job of holding the paper in place and keeping it aligned with the dust collection holes.
The dust collection on this sander is adequate when the dust bag is attached, and performs extremely well when attached to a shop vac.
One major flaw with this sander is the slide on/off switch, like most Ryobi sanders, the switch is not adequately sealed. Dust seems to have a way of finding its way in there and causing problems door the road, one problem that arose was the motor cutting in and out. So I broke the sander down and cleaned it out, which seems to have solved the problem.
Overall this is not a bad sander, but it does have its issues and there are better options to be had. I would pass on this one again and get a palm sander with a properly sealed switch.
