Vikash said:How many sheets of the 3M 2000 grit would you say you went through per cabinet on the Perceieves?
The bloke at Paints4U had a good laugh when I told him I tried the Halfords stuff
I've never tried the Halfords stuff but a local motor spares shop sells papers and these aren't any where near as good as the 3M silicon carbide stuff. They wear very quickly meaning lots needed and as you've already pointed out, they don't give the finest quality finish with more scratching even though they are supposed to be fine grit.
I use a fair amount of the 3M 2000 grit. Before you start sanding the texture of the sand paper feels like rough paper so before long your dealing with a completely smoothed out bit of paper that isn't really doing much. My guess is I used around 10-15 1/4 sheets on the palm sander for the bass cabinet excluding the baffle.
The good news is that the finish is really fine and makes rubbing and polishing out the scratches easy compared to using say 1200 or 1500grit. And because your working with such fine paper there's less chance of wrecking the work through over sanding.
The bad news is that the 3M stuff isn't cheap, I believe its around £22 for 50 sheets of the 2000grit. But by the time you've cut the paper to size for the 1/4 sheet sander you've got 200 sheets, which would do around 3 complete pairs of the Perceives, so that's a lot of paper.
Another good tip is to soak the sand paper in water over night. This give you an even finer finish.