IW, you are right, of course.
I have one last small update before I head off to work for three weeks. I turned on the Tour De France last night to watch yesterdays stage. I figured I would get a little done on the bike while watching the race. I decided I would do one of my favorite things. (not) More polishing. Except, this piece was really rough. The stator cover had seen better days.
I started out with this scratched up, dented piece. First, I block and hand sanded the deep scratches out with sand papaer. I started with 80 grit because there were some reall nasty gouges. From there I worked through 120, 400, 600, and 1000 grit. I only used the 80 and 120 on the really bad areas. After sanding, I used emery, tripoli, and finally white rouge buffing compounds with my bench grinder. With each compound I went to progressively softer wheels.
The start...actually I guess that I had started a little sanding with 80 grit by this point.
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I'm pretty sure this is after sanding out the scratches through 120 grit. I did not get every scratch out, but most are gone.
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It's a dirty job, but someones got to do it.
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I'm pretty sure this is after wet sanding 400, 600, and 1000
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First cut with emery compound...before cleaning for the next step.
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after the tripoli compound. All cleaned up and ready for the white rouge.
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After white rouge....all done, except for maybe a little hand polishing if I really feel like it.
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I don't know if this is the right way to polish....I think I got this technique off the Caswell site. Once again, not perfect, but pretty good. It seems I always have a few errant sanding scratches that I don't get out. Of course, considering that I had to use 80 grit to get the gouges out, it looks good. There were scratches all over this thing.