buffing trouble

[Albert.A]

Hello everyone, it's been a while since I posted anything on here.

I have a problem that I guess alot of other guys have run into while buffing.

The thing is, I just bought the Beall 3 on lathe mandrell from PME, and in doing so, I upgraded from 4" to 8" buffs. The polish on my pipes turns out sooooo much better with this set up, and I have finally acheived the mirror finish I have dreamt of for so long. I have however run into a problem I didn't have while using the 4" buffs. The 8" buffs have alot more surface area than the 4" ones and are also alot wider, and this results in a harder to controll buff, and right now I'm trying to polish a complex pipe with alot of well defined lines and stuff, kinda like a blowfish. While buffing said pipe, the stain lightened along these edges.
This is a problem I know exists and I tried to account for it while buffing by only running off the edges and never against them.

I did however end up with lighter stain around the edges anyway, so my question is if you guys have any suggestions on how to avoid this problem, other than being really careful and only runing off the edges, (this was not posible on some parts of the pipe, as you will see in the gallery tomorrow).

/Albert

[wdteipen]

Less compound, less pressure, and more time. And speed that bad boy up. I use the 3 in 1 mandrels too but I only put two buffs on each so it's not as crowded. You can get almost identical setup as the Beal for almost half the cost at Penn State Industries, FYI.

[baweaverpipes]

I have a small buffing wheel for my Dremel. I use that or hand sand difficult areas.

[wdteipen]

Also, if you sand to a high enough grit in the finishing stages, you can buff with red tripoli on a Q-tip, shoelace, or cotton cloth strips for those hard to reach places.

[andrew]

You remove the stain in buffing by:
1. not having a sealer,
2. burning through the sealer,
3. having too much compound on the wheel,
4. spending too much time on the wheel,
5. using the wrong wheel at the wrong time,
6. buffing at wrong rpm.

There's probably a few others, but eliminate those and you will probably find the culprit.

If it gets too crazy, hand buffing is an excellent option.
andrew

[Albert.A]

Alright thanks guys, I'll try to eliminate the variables to figure it out!

[Spit'n'Whittle]

Shoe lace! Great tip. It would have taken me a bit to come up with that.