What could be said about polishing? It is 90% surface preparation and only 10% polishing itself. A couple of delta sanders and Dremel are very useful during surface sandpapering, but always a lot of work may be done only manually or even more, only with wooden sticks wrapped in sandpaper. And even with wide usage of sanders, hands will ache after the full day of such a work.
For polishing I also use Dremel with various heads, delta sanders and electrical engine with buffing wheels of various dimensions and variety of softness. The reason of using of such variety of tools, expendable materials, not counting different kinds of polishing pasts is simple: different aluminum alloys need different treatment for achieving ideal finish.
I had a five full days of sandpapering and polishing since my last post, but I don’t complain as I finished the task. The weather was still winter :
But as part after part was finished…
… the weather grew warmer, spring came at last and began to melt snow and icicles.
But I barely have time to peer out of my garage, as I was completely absorbed in the work.
One of the reasons of such devotion was a fact of power outage in garages. Someone overloaded the power system of the entire garage complex and that caused troubles that couldn’t be fixed fast. Thus shutdowns were unpredictable and sometimes I finished my day in garage lit only by a candle light and a couple of emergency LED lamps.
And a short passage, so to say example of surface preparation, mentioned above. Clutch slave cylinder in its initial condition with painting striped by glass blasting:
If one tries to polish it as it is he’ll get quite ugly result:
Only a little of mechanization may be applied to treat such a small and completely shaped part. So it may turn out that small part needs more efforts than larger one.
But it worth of those efforts, even as result is still imperfect.
Here I interrupt my story, but in couple of days I’ll publish the post completely dedicated to results of polishing work.