Positively Powerful Polishing Practices

[randy]

Turned out nice Tom !

[maitai11]

Tom,

Those are great pieces!

I believe I have that very Dremel setup. I’ll be working on it

Best,

Tim

[tmac1956]

All:

Here are some before and after shots of the pocket watch partial movement that I dug out of the ground about 20 years ago (shown in an earlier post). David did the final buffing – he said it took less than 30 minutes with an industrial 8″ buffer.

Thanks!
Tom

[willofiam]

Hey Tom, I have a silly question…..in your latest before and after pictures, is that the same plate? William

[tmac1956]

Chris:

It does look smaller, but I didn’t disassemble it from the picture. I just sent it to him in its junky state so I figured he pulled it apart a did one plate.

Later,
Tom

[david pierce]

William,
I may have mailed the wrong plate back to Tom. I will hunt around this weekend and see if there is another one laying around somewhere. In any case the one in the after picture wasn’t in any better condition when I started the buffing process.
david

[willofiam]

Oh, o.k. Just wondering…. thought my eyes were playin tricks on me. David, what was the process for polishing? type of machine, wheel, or polishing compound did you use? William

[david pierce]

William,
I used a 1HP buffer with 8″ spiral sewn wheels. The buffing compounds were TRIPOLI and WHITE ROUGE. From what I can tell it is a fairly quick process. I believe I listed the different compounds in a previous post a couple of months ago. If you got to Youtube there is a good video about polishing from PERPLXR.
david

[chris mabbott]

David,

Have you tried this on brass plates, it would probably buff them up a treat although I wouldn’t recommend a power wheel on any demaskeened parts as it would remove the effect…

[david pierce]

Chris,
Yes, I tested it out by polishing anything made out of brass that I could get my hands on. This included brass hammers, old corroded Jacot tools, old watch plates, mainspring barrels and anything else I could get my hands on. It brought them up to a mirror finish very quickly.
david

[david pierce]

William,
By the way you polished a clock movement a while back and it looked beautiful when you finished with it. I don’t recall you letting the rest of us know the process you used.
david

[david pierce]

Update on my latest polishing adventure. Two nights ago I polished a cast aluminum machine base. The aluminum was extremely pitted and rough. I used a 1HP buffing machine with an 8 inch spiral sewn wheel. The buffing compound I used was the green buffing bar. The machine polished the base to a mirror finish in less than 2 hours. After finishing with the machine buffing I hand rubbed it with Vienna Lime and a rag.
david

[chris mabbott]

David my brother, sounds like I need you here to help me polish my car. I wonder how this would shine up my noggin? Too aggressive perhaps, maybe an unwoven silk fiber cloth for my delicate cranium 😆

[stevefitzwater]

Been experimenting with ways to buff up some movements, that have some scuffs and other issues, been playing with a Fiberglass scratch pen, for your metal movements, it does a good job of bringing back some of the shine, then applying some extra fine polishing compound, and it seems to be getting it better.

do not use that Fiberglass scratch pen on a guilded movement, I tried it on a area under one of the bridges, not pretty.. LOL

Any other methods??

[chris mabbott]

Steve, as I’m a bit anal about clean and marked up plates, it pains me to reveal that I now just leave scratches on the top zones alone. I’ve caused a worse mess by trying to remove scratches, and I’m speaking about Nickel demaskeened parts, where my efforts have diminished the loveliness of the demaskeening. I try to look at any defects as part of the history of the watch, which sometimes soothes me, but mostly it doesn’t

The Elgin convertible I’m still rebuilding is a victim of over polishing, NOT BY ME 😆 and all that nice sparkly stuff is 90% gone..

[Author]

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