Don Stauffer
It's a money vs convenience thing. The sanding sticks make a few processes easier, but you can always glue strips of sandpaper on sticks yourself. Cheaper, but a little more work.
Do you know those greeting card holders that often come with delivered flower arrangements? (They're usually made of clear plastic and look like overly-long forks.) I cut those to pieces about three or four inches long (an old pair of garden shears works for this; don't forget your eye protection), cut a piece of Testor sanding film to fit, then super glue a piece of the film to a piece of the greeting-card holder. Each of my homemade sanding sticks gets a different grade of the sandpaper, of course. I like to color-code them to match the colors of the sandpaper grades, but that's not absolutely necessary.
Here's another homemade sanding stick: Years ago, I needed to sand out a difficult-to-reach flaw in a tight area and my solution was to:
1. Cut pieces of 1/16-inch styrene rod about an inch or so long.
2. Punch out pieces of the aforementioned Testor sanding film to fit with a Micro-Mark punch set. Place a disk of sanding film shiny-side up on a piece of wax paper.
3. Carefully dip one end of a styrene rod into a droplet of super glue and remove excess glue by touching it to a napkin.
4. Carefully touch the sticky end of the styrene rod to the disk of sanding film. (Later, I went on to color-code these too, but again it's not mandatory.)
Recently I made a larger version of these out of 1/8-inch styrene rod cut about 2 1/2 inches long.