Review: Dewalt DWE6420 Random Orbit Sander

The Dewalt DWE6421 random orbit sander is an excellent performing sander that uses a PSA pad rather than a hook and loop pad. This sander is almost identical to the DWE6421 orbit sander except for the PSA pad. Let’s take a closer look at this one.

Sanding Power & Motor

This orbit sander has pretty good sanding power for it’s size. It has a 3 amp motor that runs at 12,000 OPM. This is a single speed sander and there in no variable speed option. The speed is fast on this sander and people say that it feels a little faster when under load than some other sanders they’ve used.

This sander is powerful enough and suitable for sanding a wide range of materials such as wood, plastic and metals. The random orbit action keeps the sanding surfaces smooth and without the circular grain patterns some orbit sanders can leave behind.

Handheld Design

This sander has rubber grips in all the right spots and it’s designed to feel very comfortable in your hands. Keeping a good grip on an orbit sander is very important and there’s no negatives here. The power cord manages to stay mostly out of the way and doesn’t feel awkward during use. The smaller vertical profile of the sander helps to get into smaller spots, which can come in handy if your projects require.

Sanding Pad

This sander uses a 5 inch, 8 hole PSA pad which is an adhesive-style pad. PSA stands for pressure sensitive adhesive. This is different from the hook and loop style pads, and sometimes people buy one or the other and don’t realize the different options exist.

PSA pads are more rigid in design and will flex less over the surface you are sanding. For this reason, using this type of pad on an orbit sanders can be preferable for trying to smooth out or flatten a surface with more even finishes. This is in contrast to a hook and loop pad, which might flex a little more easily over round edges and uneven surfaces. Hook and loop pad/discs are much more popular now but PSA is still out there as well.

Dust Collection

The dust collection bag that comes with the sander kit doesn’t exactly impress people who own this sander. People have issues with keeping it properly attached during use and they find that a lot of dust just doesn’t get collected very well. The bag is also small and needs to be emptied often for anything but smaller jobs. So the dust collection bag isn’t really winning anybody over with this sander.

It works much better to hook this up to a dust collector or a vacuum, and if you go this route you’ll get much better results. The dust port on this sander works directly with the DWV010 and DWV012 dust collectors from Dewalt. There is also the DWV9000 Universal Quick Connector which will allow you to connect this sander to 1-1/4 inch vacuum hoses.

Build Quality

This is a fairly well built tool and it feels like it has a little more plastic and rubber going on than some other power tools from Dewalt. That is mostly due to design since sanders don’t need to have a lot of structural metal framing to do their job and are instead trying to be lighter and more easier to grip and handle. This sander feels lightweight at 2.9 lbs. There is pretty good effort put into the design to keep problematic dust from building up in undesirable spots. Overall, the build quality is good but it does feel a little less robust than some other sanders.

Included Accessories

This sander comes standard with a dust bag. There aren’t any kits for this sander that we have seen. Here’s what’s in the box for most of these tools:

• Dust Bag

Other Available Accessories

Dewalt offers some accessories to expand the capabilities of this router, which need to be purchased separately. There’s may also be kits or packages that include these accessories. Here’s what’s available.

Dewalt DWV012 Dust Extractor

Setup & Assembly

This sander is very easy to setup and start using. We recommend to read through the manual so you don’t miss out on any of the small details for use and maintenance. But otherwise this is about as close as you can get to being able to just pull a tool out of the box and start using it right away.

Warranty

Dewalt offers a 3 year warranty on defective parts or workmanship. They also include a 1 year free service contract and a 90 day money back guarantee. This is good enough to help you out if you have quality control issues in that first year of use.