Tooling up for Buffing

Today I’ve been getting up to speed on bench buffers. I bought an old Baldor yesterday, and I need to get it working correctly. I also need things like wheels and compounds.

I learned a lot this morning. I watched a Youtube video from Eastwood. They’ve carved out a place in the market by selling car enthusiasts pretty good tools for very good prices. If you buy Eastwood stuff, you may not get the very best performance and reliability, but you will also get into the game a lot faster and cheaper.

Eastwood has a lot of educational videos. I’ll embed their buffing lecture here.

Here is what I learned:

1. I should get one spiral-sewn cloth wheel for every abrasive I use, except for emery and polishing. Otherwise, I’ll have to use a device known as a rake to clean the compound of of the wheel every time I change abrasives. That isn’t happening. The video guy says you should store your compound and matching wheels together to prevent mixups.

2. I need a hard sisal wheel, several spiral wheels, a loose cloth wheel, and a canton flannel wheel. Sisal is for emery, which is very coarse. Spiral wheels are for tripoli, stainless steel, plastic compound, and red rouge. The other wheels are for polishing with diamond rouge. I may have this wrong, but I should be close.

3. The basic abrasive compounds are emery (coarse), stainless compound, tripoli, plastic compound, red rouge, and white rouge.

I hope I got this right.

My buffer has 3/4″ arbors. Chinese buffers typically have 1/2″ or 5/8″ arbors. That means it’s not easy for me to find wheels. The answer is Caswell Plating. This is a company that sells plating, polishing, anodizing, and oxide-finishing products. I found what I needed (or thought I needed) on their site. I also bought assorted abrasives.

My buffer does not run as smoothly as I would like. It doesn’t screech, but it rumbles a little. I don’t think it should do that. I looked up the bearings for it, and I have a pair on the way. I don’t know if they’ll improve things, but for $14, it’s worth a shot. I suppose there could be something out of balance inside the buffer, but that seems unlikely. It had to get past Baldor QC.

I checked the runout with an indicator, and it’s well under 0.001″. The bearings make a little noise when I rotate the wheels by hand.

To get the bearings off and back on, I’ll have to use my hydraulic press. That may be awkward. I’ll have to hold a long armature and shaft vertically on steel plates. Ordinarily, you could use a bearing puller to remove a bearing, but I would need one with an 8″ reach and a 2.5″ capacity (diameter), and they don’t pop up when I search for them online. Some guys use hammers to remove old bearings and beat new ones on. That seems stupid. I don’t think hitting a new bearing with a hammer can improve it any.

I found out why the buffer has a magnetic switch. It’s a safety thing. If the power goes out while the buffer is running, the magnetic switch prevents it from turning back on when the power returns. It also has some kind of thermal protection, which I didn’t bother reading about.

I don’t really need the switch, but it’s not hurting anything, and it could frustrate a kid who walked by the buffer and tried to turn it on. You can pull the skin off your hand, like a pink, bloody glove, with one of these machines. I suppose it’s nice to know that will be harder for kids to do.

I am trying to figure out what to do about stabilizing the buffer. I’m resisting drilling my floor as hard as I can. Every time I moved the buffer, I would have to drill new holes. Ugly. But buffers are dangerous, and they need to be secured. I could secure it to a heavy bench or something, but then I wouldn’t have that cool Baldor pedestal under it. I could put the pedestal on my bench grinder, however.

The main thing, when you use a buffer, is not to be an idiot. You have to study up on safety and avoid doing stupid things. Not long ago, a well-known knifemaker was buffing a knife, and his buffer took it out of his hands and threw it back to him, right into his heart. Naturally, he died. Sounds like he was standing in the wrong place and holding a small object in his bare hands while buffing. Those are things everyone knows they shouldn’t do. I read stories like that, and I try to plan ahead.

I don’t know if a buffer can hurt you when you stand to the side. I know it’s a lot safer than standing in front of it, waiting to catch whatever it throws. Before I put solid metal wheels on my bench grinder, I always stood to the side when I used it. I try to stay out of the plane of my chainsaws. When I use a table say, I try not to stand directly behind the wood. You do what you can.

Most people, including professionals, bring tools home and flail away with no training and no common sense. It’s awfully unusual to hear about an accident that didn’t involve stupid behavior.

I believe I’ve watched every episode of Forged in Fire. I’ve seen people hold things under a drill press with their bare hands instead of clamping them. I’ve seen people lean over a container of warm, combustible oil while shoving a red-hot knife into it. It’s startling what people who claim to be experienced will do.

When my bearings arrive, I’ll pop them in and see if the buffer sounds better. It pretty much has to, unless something is unbalanced, and that’s unlikely. I could fix something like that if I could find places to remove metal inside the buffer. I don’t expect a problem, however.

I expect to be fully operational within a week.

I forgot to order a wire wheel! I better get on that.

Hope your Sunday is going well. Mine sure is.