DIY Mini Sanding Machine from an Electric Toothbrush

If you are interested in a DIY mini sanding machine, you might want to take a look at this article.

If you often encounter metal items, such as plugs, knives, or other metal-cased objects whose surfaces have oxidized and rusted, you may need to sand them with sandpaper. However, sanding rust on small parts by hand is very difficult—it is inefficient and wastes a lot of sandpaper. At this point, you might come up with the idea of using an electric toothbrush combined with sandpaper for polishing. If you happen to have an electric toothbrush, you can start making a sanding tool with it.

First, you can saw off the front section of an old manual toothbrush. You can use a hacksaw to cut a groove and secure it with iron wire so it can be used to clean other items. Because the soft bristles do not work very well, you can cut off the bristles and attach sandpaper instead for sanding purposes.

After cutting off the bristles, you can use double-sided tape to stick sandpaper onto the head. Then insert it into the main body of the toothbrush, and in this way you have made a micro sanding machine. If you do not want to cut the bristles, you can also stick the sandpaper on the back side instead, allowing it to be used for both sanding and cleaning.

This electric toothbrush has three speed settings, and you should use the second setting for the strongest performance.

You can try sanding a relay pin that has copper oxide (green patina) on it. In just a few minutes, it will become shiny again. Manual sanding would take more than 10 minutes and still would not achieve the same result, and the surface would also end up relatively rough.

You can also try another test: sanding the four pins of an automotive relay. It only consumes about 1 cm² of sandpaper. It is environmentally friendly, cost-saving, highly efficient, and very simple.