Hi, my name's Steve Summers,
and I'm the owner of SummerShine Metal Polishing
here in east central Illinois.
When a dirty wheel comes into the shop,
the first thing we need to do is assess how bad it is
and how deep we need to sand it,
and then move on to the polishing
and then the buffing process from there.
So, on a wheel that has a lot of
caked-on debris or dirt,
break dust, something like that,
sandpaper takes too long, and it's not really
efficient to use sandpaper sheets.
So for that scenario, we'll use a fiber disk,
where it'll go through, and the fiber disk itself
will strip off all that dirt and debris ahead of time
and get us down to a clean aluminum finish.
In the sanding process, we use a rotary
and then also a random orbit sanding styles.
The rotary just moves in a circular clockwise motion,
whereas a random orbit moves
in various directions as it's sanding.
Using a random orbit sander
instead of using the rotary sander
is because the rotary sander
takes off so much material so fast
that you can leave actual waves
or ripples in the material.
When you come back with a random orbit sander,
it allows you to smooth that back out
and get a smooth finish across the top of the metal
so there's no waves in it.
The sanding grits that we use
start as low as a 120 grit
and go up to a 600 grit.
Now, the difference between those
is how coarse they are.
The 120 grit is very coarse,
like you would find on the coarse side of a nail file,
whereas the 600 grit is much more smooth,
like you would also see on the smoother side
of a nail file, something that would be
very smooth and almost to a polish.
The reason that sanding is such an important step
is because you have to get a metal
to a surface that is ready to be polished.
So the sanding step is actually more important
than the actual polishing step.
It's your prep side.
You have to make sure that the surface is smooth
and ready to be polished,
otherwise what'll happen is the metal
will start to gall and start to move around,
and you won't get the clarity that you're looking for.
So, polishing, buffing is kind of a synonymous term
when it comes to the industry that I'm in,
but the polishing process uses a much heavier grit
that still leaves some haze, some fine scratches behind,
whereas when you move into the buffing process,
it uses a softer pad
and a less gritty compound to go with it.
It's a lot softer compound that will leave
a much higher finish, higher shine on it.
Some of the worst wheels that we get in
are wheels that are coated with
either paint or powder coat,
and the reason for that is that paint
and powder coat is hard to sand it.
Sometimes we'll more smear rather than sand,
and then when you go to something
like a media-blasted wheel that comes in,
it's very difficult because the media blasting
cuts down so deep into the aluminum
that you have to sand an extreme amount
to get to the bottom of those media-blasting pores.
On a wheel that has intricate spokes
and details within the wheel,
we have to use smaller bits.
We'll use a rotary tool much like a Dremel
and things like that that are very small,
eighth-inch and quarter-inch die grinder bits.
The eighth-inch and quarter-inch bits
sometimes have a felt point or a cotton tip on them,
and what that allows you to do is it allows you
to get down inside those fine details
and polish them out to that mirror finish
that we're looking for.
A situation where I'd have to work it by hand
would be where the wheel that I'm trying to do,
whatever finish I'm trying to achieve,
I may not have a tool that goes up high enough
in a grit for that, so high enough finish,
and so I'll have to use other tools and hand-sand it,
or sometimes you just can't get the tooling down in there,
so it requires you to use your hand and work in there
and get in the tight corners and stuff like that.
When it comes down to how long it takes
to do something, it really depends
on what condition it is when it comes in.
If you get something that's a very new wheel,
it can take you a half hour to an hour to do a wheel.
Or if you get something that's really bad,
it can take three to four hours
to get that wheel back to a high finish.