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I just finished staining my first bent pipe. I'm pretty pleased with my first try. There's a slight bend to the shank when looked at from the top down, but the next will be better.

My problem is the buffing and waxing.

Since the shank and stummel make less than a 90 degree angle, how do I get in there without over-buffing around where they meet? How do I get a nice, clean wax application in there? My wife suggested trimming my sewn muslin buff to a taper for the waxing, but as I only have one at the moment I am reluctant to start hacking away at it.



As always, I will be grateful for any suggestions.

Firstly, I would recommend an unstitched wheel for applying your carnauba wax, rather than a stitched wheel. Because it is unstitched, it gets into tight corners, but isn't at all agressive, since you don't want to "lean into it" when applying wax. You use a light touch to apply the wax and hand buff to a shine or use another clean unstitched wheel to polish.

If you're really concerned about getting into the corner on bent pipes to do your compound buffing, get a narrow stitched wheel, 1/4" or 1/2" width with 1" stitch spacing. Tighter stitching would be more agressive, but in the end you have to follow your own road.

...or somebody uses the Dremel tool to polish the hard-to-reach parts of his pipes...

I do what Frank has suggested. I have one set of buffs that's "doubled up", meaning there's two buffs mounted on the arbor. The other is a single buff mounted on an arbor. When I need to get into the tighter spots, I mount up the single buff and I'm able to get to those areas.

As an aside, you're going to want to invest in a few more buffs. You should have:

1 buff for brown tripoli
1 buff for white diamond
1 buff for carnauba application
1 clean buff for final, dry buff

stitched or unstitched you'll have to decide on your own. I use unstitched for all except for wax application. I removed about two rows of stitching from this buff to allow it to give a bit.

tritrek wrote:...or somebody uses the Dremel tool to polish the hard-to-reach parts of his pipes...

I tried this once and found it to be disasterous. The slowest speed on a dremel is still too fast and aggressive and can remove too much material.