Candling A Top

[johnnparchem]

I am not sure you can achieve the joint you want sanding it the way you describe. As you will always be sanding hollows. I normally use a plane but I have had issues with tear out where I switched to sanding. I have had success sanding using a very flat surface longer than the plate. I use a a long 6 inch wide piece of plate glass. I sand both plates together. When sanding by hand most likely you will apply a forward downward pressure in one direction and a backward downward pressure in the reverse direction, resulting in an unusable convex shape. I control that in two ways. 1. I sand in one direction being careful to apply as even as pressure as possible. 2. Knowing that it is easiest to end up with a undesirable convex shape, I place a couple of layers of masking tape underneath the glass, perpendicular across the center of the glass plate. Basically I sand on a slightly convex surface.