I have a friend who loves sanding his projects. Personally I find it tedious, especially when I have lots of small pieces to sand.
Here's a procedure I've used effectively twice.
I had 80 small octagonal disks (1 inch [2.5 cm] across and about 1/4" [6 mm] thick) that needed to be sanded.
They were sliced off an octagonally shaped length of wood, meaning that each face of the disk was end grain.
The wood was splintery enough that even with a sharp clean table saw blade, some tearing occurred, so I switched to the bandsaw,
which provided a cleaner exit cut. Of course, that left a pretty rough end-grain face on each side of the disk, however.
My next step was to tape them down to a sheet of plywood -- tightly adjacent to each other, so that they effectively
formed a sheet with holes between them -- with double-face tape and sand both faces smooth.
The sanding left very slight tearout edges on the disk, but noticeable enough that the tearout had to be removed.
I placed the disks into a large margarine container along with a handful of torn-up pieces of used sandpaper that
I had saved for the purpose, along with a couple of handfuls of pistachio nut shells (pieces of walnut shell would work very well, too).
I wrapped the margarine container in some bubble-wrap and foam, and stuffed it into a plastic grocery bag.
I put the bag into the clothes drying (on air only setting -- no heat) along with a few large (dry) towels, and let it run for 20 minutes.
The results were perfect: the arrises were nicely softened but not really rounded.
One caution: this procedure works best when all the wood pieces are of the same or nearly the same density/hardness.
I found out the hard way that putting pine and oak pieces into the same batch results in the pine pieces having dents in them.
The batch shown is western birch and koa; they got along very well.
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