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Polishers - what am I doing wrong?

10K views 27 replies 11 participants last post by  oldred 
#1 ·
I've been sanding down my intake over the past few weeks and today had my first shot at using the buffing/polishing compounds and wheels I got from Eastwood. What a disaster. I hope someone can tell me from these pictures what I'm doing wrong.

Problem #1 I started with a 4" spiral sewn buffing wheel mounted on a drill (approx 1300 RPM at max speed). To test things out I began by touching the spinning wheel to a brick of 220 compound to load it up. The buffing wheel immediately began to disintegrate with fluff and string flying all over the place. I expected a "bit" of lint (as per the directions) but as you can see from the picture it tore things up pretty bad. The second problem, as seen in the picture, is that since the wheel is sewn in a spiral and since the material in the wheel furthest from the stitching lets go first, the wheel immediately goes out of round and the compound only adheres to the sections nearest the stitching which hold together the tightest. You can see in the first picture the green compound on the right and nothing on the left. It doesn't show in the picture but the green section where the compound stuck is right down by the stitching.



Problem #2 I then decided to give on the wheel for the moment test one of the felt bobs. I also decided that possibly the problem was with the 220 compound so switched to Tripoli compound. I applied the compound to the spinning bob in what appeared to be fairly uniform coverage. When I began to polish the manifold with the bob getting the results shown in the next picture below. A gob of black, hard, tar quickly formed and I could only get it off using 80 grit sandpaper. The third picture shows the bob itself after my attempted use.





I tried a couple additional experiments with the felt bob - running at faster speeds in my die grinder, running with more/less compound, and applying less/more pressure on the bob as I buffed. The only difference was that in some cases I could produce slightly less of the hard black tar on the manifold. But in all cases, it just made a huge mess of my nicely sanded manifold.

Obviously I'm doing something very very wrong and hopefully someone can steer me onto the straight and narrow.
 
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