Hi, I'm Jenny from Tormach, and today we're gonna talk about aesthetic
polishing. Before I came to Tormach I worked in mold making for about eleven
years. And I had the great luxury of working under some incredible mold
polisher. Before I get in depth, I do want to give a huge shout out to Suzy,
who I worked underneath for a couple years. Who taught me some amazing
techniques. A lot of you've probably already seen The Hacksmith video, where they
were making real-life lightsabers. I had the great honor of getting to machine
that lightsaber, and also polish it. So kind of the purpose of polishing, is to
remove tool marks. And you're basically cross-hatching. You're changing kind of
how the metal, how the light reflects off the metal. There's a little bit more science
involved, but I'm just going to kind of keep it at that, and cover technique. So
the first thing you're gonna need are some stones. I like to use my mold maker
stones. I start at 220 grit, and work all the way up to 1200 grit. You can kind of
change up the progression depending on what kind of surface that you are
looking for. The next thing you're gonna need is your secret weapon.This actually
started out as mineral spirits, clear mineral spirits, and I've turned it into
a slurry through the polishing process. And the last part that we're going to go
over today is finally papers. So on this guy, I went up from 500 paper to 1200
paper. The best thing about polishing is you can take it anywhere. When you got a
nice light piece like this, you can do it out on the patio. I did
this at home on the patio, up playing trivia while having a couple beers. It's
kind of like knitting, only way better because I suck at knitting. This
particular piece because I was doing it all manually took roughly about 16 hours.
Because there's a lot of splines and undercuts, and I wanted to get everything
just right, and polishing can be a little bit time-consuming, but it's incredibly
rewarding. All machining processes create tool marks. What we're trying to achieve
here is to create an aesthetically pleasing part, that looks like it was not
machined. So I left the bottom of the lightsaber unpolished. So you can see we
have our marks from the end mill. And this is actually raw stock, so you can
kind of see the two different unfinished, untouched parts of the lightsaber. Then I
went against the grain of the toolmarks, with 220. Now you have to be really
careful with the 220 stone. The 220 stone's incredibly coarse, and all you're
trying to do is relieve about 70 to 80 percent of those tool marks. You can
go too deep, especially with real heavy pressure, and
then you start gouging the metal and creating more scratches. So right now,
we're just evening out those tool marks. You'll notice that I'm doing real small
overlapping strokes, and I'm taking my polishing strokes rather lightly. There's
a little bit of pressure there, but again, we don't want to gouge the material. For
the next stone, we're actually gonna go... some people say 45 degrees, I go 90 to 45.
But you can see, I went the opposite direction. So in this we did the 220
stone, the 320 stone, this is the 400 stone. You'll notice as we're going up
that that finish is getting a lot finer, then we go to a 600 stone, 900 stone, and
1200 stone. And then we jump over to papers, and then I did 500 paper, 600
paper, a thousand paper, and 1200 paper. If you take a look at this stone, I actually
have it shaped exactly the same radius as the spline. You can shape it with
another stone. I actually use the burr on the spline in order to shape this, and
deburr it, and get in this. We're not gonna do a high shine in the spline, just
because there's really not a whole lot of room, and that's gonna take way too
much time. So as you look at this, you can kind of stop at any finish that you want.
Some people have a desired finish that's a little bit more muted. This is about as
high polish as we can get with just stone and paper. Next we're going to take
this and make it really shine using these.
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