Stopped by an old hardware store in Savannah and picked up a trick for sanding

I was killing time before a meeting last weekend and ducked into this tiny hardware store on Bull Street that's been there since the 1950s. The guy running it was probably 80 years old and he saw me grabbing sandpaper for a dresser I'm refinishing. He told me to wet the wood with a damp rag before the final sanding pass to raise the grain, then hit it with 220 grit when it's dry. I tried it on that oak dresser I've been working on for two weeks and the difference was night and day. No more fuzzy feeling after the first coat of poly. It added maybe 10 minutes to my process but saved me from doing a whole extra sanding round. Has anyone else tried wetting wood before the last sanding pass on a project?

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matthewross13h ago

Yeah I saw a video from a cabinet maker out in Oregon who swears by this. He said it saves him from having to do a third coat of poly half the time. I tried it on a walnut tabletop and it definitely cut down on the grain raise after staining.