Lesson 3: Sanding and Polishing

Lesson 3: Sanding and Polishing
After filing your piece, the edges still aren’t nice and smooth. You will want to sand them.
To sand, start with the coarsest gauge paper (220/230) and move through each paper until you reach the finest grade (600)
For flat surfaces:
• Sand on the sanding disks, or tape a piece of sandpaper to one of the boards.
• Sand in a circular pattern. Finish by going back and forth in one direction. This allows you to see easily when you are ready to move on to the next grit.
For curves:
• Wrap sandpaper around either your file or a paint stirrer (or similar) and use as you would for filing.
• Sandpaper has no direction, go back and forth.
Move to the next grit when all the scratches from the previous grit are removed.


Polishing:
After sanding, you can polish your piece. Polishing will give a high shine or mirror finish. Polishing will not remove scratches that you missed with your sandpaper!
For edges: use either a burnisher or a felt wheel on the flex shaft.
For surfaces: use the polishing machine
To polish on the machine:
• Make sure that the correct buff is on the mandrel.
• Buffs marked steel or plastic are only for use on those materials.
• White diamond (pre-polish: step 1) is on the left, Red Rouge (high polish: step 2) is on the right.
• Put on dust mask, face mask, and apron.
• Tie back hair; remove any chains that could get caught.
• Turn on ventilation.
• Turn on machine.
• Hold bar of polishing compound to the wheel, transferring some compound to the wheel. This is called charging.
• Work on the bottom quarter of the wheel.
• Hold your piece firmly, and move in slow steady motions.
• After using White diamond, wash off your piece in the sink with soap and water to remove all compound residue.
• Dry piece.
• Use red rouge.
• Wash off piece with soap and water, dry
To turn off: Turn off machine and wait for the wheels to spin down and slow, then turn off ventilation. Lastly, step on the lever at bottom a couple times. After all this, remove face protection.

To polish using the flexshaft:
• Put the correct buff into the handpiece.
• Put on dust mask.
• Place grinding box in dust drawer.
• Tie back hair; remove any chains.
• Step on foot pedal to turn on flexshaft.
• Hold handpiece and piece to be polished inside grinding box.
• Charge buff and polish as on the machine.
• After polishing, dump any dirt in box into trash and wash out the grinding box.
• Replace both grinding box and chuck key to their proper locations.



Tips and tricks:
• Do not use the brass brushes to remove compound from your piece while washing- this creates scratches!
• If the wheel looks to have too much compound on it, use the buffing rake in the cabinet to remove excess. Hold the rake against the wheel while the machine is on. The teeth of the rake loosen old compound. (only on polishing machine)
• If you see scratches, go back to sandpaper.
• NEVER use the polishing machine or flexshaft with a chain!