Buffing wheel safety.

[S. Heslop]

This is a topic that i'm having an oddly difficult time finding information on.

My main concern is of course parts catching. The thing I want to polish seems like it'd be particularly prone to catching.



I want to try polishing these with a wheel mostly to round the edges. The other ways I can think of doing it all require alot of tedious and hard work.

But I don't really know enough about polishing to know if this is viable.

[Pete.]

Wouldn't you be better-off with a scotchbrite wheel? I don't think de-burring those with a mop will go very well.

[chipenter]

A whire weel would de bur them first then polish on a sisle mop .

[SwarfnStuff]

At the risk of preaching to the converted, your concern about safety is good whichever wheel you choose.
  I would start with wire then move to whatever your favourite buffing wheel is. Safety wise, and I'm sure you realise anyway, stand to one side, never directly in front. Wear full face protection specially with the wire, safety goggles are better than glasses but that wire hurts, so full face protection is the way to go. Try as best you can to have the hook / catchy bits pointing away from the wheel rotation.
John B

[DMIOM]

Couple of risk-reduction ideas:

If you're using a bench-top machine, you could probably get a lot of the initial work done using a bristle mop (such as this one currently on eBay. A bristle wheel is less likely to catch but they do fling an odd high-speed bristle out at you occasionally!   Even used dry, they'll do a particularly good job of cleaning up the threaded portion, I also use them on knurled work.  If you do use them with buffing compound, you need to be careful when you load the wheel as a bristle brush can eat into your compound bar at an alarming rate (and spray most of it everywhere!).

Whatever wheel you're using, the highest risk will, I suspect, be when you're polishing the hooked end. You won't want to grab the thread with a pair of mole grips - but that would fit beautifully into some form of handle - just pop a suitable threaded hole deep enough into a length of scrap bar to make a handle to hold them by?

You could then reverse the 'mass/power balance' by using a handheld machine (Dremel, die grinder etc.) with any of the vast range of small polishing felts, mops, wheels etc. out there.

Dave

[S. Heslop]

I do have a wire wheel so I might go with that. Using a rotary tool sounds like a good idea too. A handle was something I was considering but I was a bit worried that adding more mass to the parts might just make a heavier weight to get thrown, but then I like the idea of keeping my hands well away from a wire wheel.

[awemawson]

I have a very healthy respect for buffing wheels ever since an incident at school in the metal work shop back in the 1960's. A boy was polishing a rather nice copper lamp that he'd made - basically copper angle brazed into a sort of fish tank. When the yelling stopped and the machine was turned off two of his fingers appeared to be completely severed. Fortunately the hospital stitched him up and he didn't lose any, but it was rather nasty. The lamp was just a twisted wreck 

He wasn't wearing gloves. Now I wear heavy leather gloves if buffing, and try always to remember to wear a full face mask so if anything goes bouncing about at least my eyes should survive.

[S. Heslop]

I overdid it.



I had a hard job preventing it from getting a pointy tip on the face. I might be best just deburring them by hand with a file, emery cloth, or the rotary tool before polishing them. The wire wheel is a bit too aggressive.

[DMIOM]

yes, you'd be safer using a less aggressive bristle brush like the one I linked to earlier - they're non-metallic bristles

[vtsteam]

Not for safety reasons, particularly, but I've found that as I've grown older, I enjoy files and filing more. A new file is a pleasure to use, and hard to explain why. Especially since when I was 13 my father had my brother and I filing and linishing parts at his machine shop as a summer job. In fact I had zero interest in machining after that up until I somehow re-discovered it on my own throught the Gingery books at 50 yrs age. Now I like filing. Go figure.

[S. Heslop]

Not for safety reasons, particularly, but I've found that as I've grown older, I enjoy files and filing more. A new file is a pleasure to use, and hard to explain why. Especially since when I was 13 my father had my brother and I filing and linishing parts at his machine shop as a summer job. In fact I had zero interest in machining after that up until I somehow re-discovered it on my own throught the Gingery books at 50 yrs age. Now I like filing. Go figure.

I've been getting alot of use out of files after I bought an assorted bundle of pretty good ones from ebay. I keep thinking that some day i'll build a wheellock gun just as an excuse to use a bunch of files. I did look into the legality of it, even posted a thread, and it looks like alot of work to get all the right certificates. While that itself doesn't put me off it's more that I don't really have the time for a project i'd have to take very seriously.

This banjo stuff is fine because i'm ready to drop it when some stuff i'm trying to sort out eventually gets... sorted out.

[Lew_Merrick_PE]

Back in the late-1960's and early-1970's when I was making 10-20 banjos/year, I made a forging dieset to finish by head tension hooks so that I had a better flat to fit my tension hoop.  The tool I used to remove the flash and polish them up was an abrasive-embedded rubber wheel (then sold under the Cratex brandname) mounted on an 8 inch bench grinder.  I used a fairly aggressive abrasive wheel to remove the flash and a finer one to polish them.

The (8 inch) Cratex wheels appear to have disappeared from the market, but I see equivalent in many of the shops with whom I work.  Not having earned my living making chips since the mid-1970's, I am out of touch with many of the "modern" technologies.  The only Cratex products I have seen of late are used in die grinders.

[Jonny]

With any mop polisher it has the tendency when it grabs to fling the part downwards.
Small parts are easily lost and build up heat quick. My method is to keep rotating the parts, whilst doing one the others are cooling, especially if a heat retaining item such as aluminiums.

Never wear gloves, you want to get a feel for whats happening. Gloves will reduce the heat coming through the part/s but will have little feeling holding the part, subsequently wont know whether holding tight enough or when its starting to grab. Can be all over in less than 1 second parts grabbing then bouncing off 6 walls and ceiling.
Hate it with a passion much prefer bead blasting the last 15 years, pedestal 10" polisher running 6000rpm reverse (just hang on) been outside the last 13 years, cant even give it away.
To back that up professional polishers don't wear gloves for above reasons.

A hard woven mop and a 60 to 100 grit soap forget the name but a rouge will rip those edges straight off, sparks will fly. Just go down the grades until desired finish.

Since my rouge/brown 80grit has gone hard, should be kept in fridge its gone off, depending how many might have tried linishing the edges to shape then a mop jobby.