On Sat, 06 Oct 2007 20:41:57 +0800, ABC wrote:

I hope I have come to the right NG as I saw many threads about buffing
here. I just want to learn to buff small metal articles like stainless
steel watch bands, spoons etc. I bought a 1/6 hp motor with flex
shaft, white and green rouge, and some small buffing wheels. These are
my problems so far:

1: Do I need to change the "angle of attack", or just always apply the
wheel to the work piece in one same direction? It seems that once I
change the angle, the lust disappears somewhat.

2. For the finer buffing , I used a cloth wheel(just sewn once near
the middle). One the wheel revs up, the cloth thread begins to fly
out( because of the anti centrifugal force ) so there is lint all over
the place and the wheel gets smaller and smaller. Even worse when I
apply the wheel to the rouge. Is the normal for this kind of wheels?
Should I just tolerate the lint?

I've been doing a lot of buffing lately, and I found that this is a
matter of spinning the wheel way too fast.

Most of my buffing is done by putting cloth wheels on an arbor and
putting them in a drill chuck on my lathe. I then spin them at 3600
RPM. When I tried to make this a little more mobile by putting a
buffing wheel on my angle grinder (which spins a lot faster) it did
exactly what you describe. The downside, aside from the obvious mess
from the lint, is that the buffing grit flies off almost immediately,
and it doesn't work nearly as well. Better to keep those RPMs lower-
not so slow that you can't get the job done, but slow enough to keep
the wheel from flying apart.

IIRC, the traditional way to do this is to mount the buffing wheels on
a standard bench grinder, and remove the guards. It also helps if the
grinder has long arbors on it, so you can get oddly-shaped pieces in
there.

3. It seems that the finer the rouge, the slower RPM should be used?
Correct?

I haven't found that, particularly. You could be right, but I would
actually assume the opposite is true. High speed = better finish and
more material removal as a general rule. It's with your more
aggressive grits that you probably want to slow it down to make sure
you don't buff away material you'd rather keep.