Home Depot's Porter Cable Drywall Sander

I fix houses to make money, in case you didn't know. I'm currently building an addition on one house and I'm remodeling another. Since this is something that I know a lot about, I figure I should post things every now and again. This is going to be a negative post.

Let's start with the simple fact that I despise drywall work. Even a small patch in a wall is something I dread. I know how to do the work, I have the tools (except the sander), and I still hate it. It's slow, it seems you repeat the same steps over and over again, the drywall mud itself dries your skin something fierce, and the dust when sanding is fucking awful. This leads me to the Porter Cable sander.

Porter Cable is a good company. Their tools are well built and tough. Their reciprocating saw (commonly referred to as a "Sawzall" even though that's a brand name of the Milwaukee tool company, just like copiers are all "Xerox" machines) with the rotating head is quite amazing to use being versatile, smooth, and powerful.

Their drywall sander carried by Home Depot's rental department leaves a lot to desire. Of course Home Depot is a stinking pile of shit as far as stores go but they rent tools and Lowe's doesn't.

Perhaps I should define a drywall sander for you. In the old days, between coats of joint compound (a.k.a. mud), one would sand the joints with a hand sander, dust flying everywhere leaving the worker and the work area, floor to ceiling, coated in a fine, white powder. Then along came the powered sander. The sanding portion is a large round disc attached to wand. The discs spins and a vacuum sucks the dust through the wand, down a hose, and into the vacuum.

Porter Cable's wand works just fine, and I've used their machines before in the past and they were great. Here's where this one that I rented from Home Depot falls way short: the vacuum. The units that I used before had this neat levered comb type mechanism that allowed you to unclog the filter without opening the machine. This machine has to be opened up and the filter beaten out by hand. There's a valve on it that seems to be for reversing the air but it doesn't work at all. This means that for every two or three minutes of use there's a minute of beating out the machine. And in the meantime the room is full of dust. There's a minimal reduction in dust over hand sanding, and the wand does make for a nice, smooth finish, but the dust collection is awful. As a matter of a fact, the units on the Porter Cable website look like the machines I used to rent with the flat, top mounted filter. The Home Depot rental model has a cylindrical filter screwed on the center of the lid, inside the unit.

I'm hoping I've gotten a broken version of this machine but I must say I'm very disappointed.