It is possible to polish steel using an angle grinder. You can get quite a good
finish using a polishing kit. That is a piece of steel that has been
polished as you can see the finish on that is very good. You can actually get
it better than that we do still have a saw mark in there so it depends on the
amount of time you are prepared to spend doing the polishing. But you can quite easily
get a mirror-like finish like that as long as you are prepared to put in the
time. So normally the steel would look like this. This is high carbon steel and
that has been cut on a metal cutting band saw. So you can see that the finish
on that is not at all good. We do have some burrs on there and we have quite a
lot of saw marks. By using a flap disc like that or a grinding disc it is
possible to get a finish like that. So by using this we have actually removed
all of the saw marks. That is relatively easy to do and that simply fits into an
angle grinder. These are all for a 4.5 inch angle grinder.
I am then going to use this polishing kit which is made by Dronco and that actually shows you
the different discs that you can fit on this. So we have the brown the blue and
then the white one. When you use the white one you use the polishing
compounds. So these are the discs that is the brown one that is not as abrasive
as the disc that we used the first time around which was the flap disk and that will
bring the metal to a finish like that. You can then use the blue disk which is
finer still, and that will give you a finish like that. So each time the
abrasive is getting finer and it is giving you a better finish. When we get
to the end we use this felt disc which is very soft and with that we use
these polishing compounds, the white one first and then the blue one. The white
one will give you a mirror finish like that which is very smooth and then when you
use a blue one you will get a better finish like that. I have to point out that this
is high carbon steel so it is a very good quality steel and can be polished
and give you a really good result like that. If you were to polish other steel such as
stainless steel you would probably also get a similar result. But as you can see that
is very reflective that has given us a very good finish. So I'm now going to
take this piece and we'll put it in the vice and I'm going to show you the steps
that we go through to transform something like that into looking something like that.
It's also a good idea when you're using an angle grinder to use a
full faced visor, some hearing protection and also some good quality safety glasses.
You may also need to use a dust mask. I'm going to start off first of all
using the flap disc and I'm going to use that to remove all the burrs and
remove all the rough parts from this piece of steel.
After a couple of minutes you end up with a surface like that, you can see that all
the saw marks have now gone. So we are now going to swap over to the next disc.
You can see that we've now got a good finish on that so it's now time to swap the disk again.
We have now got quite a good finish on there so it's now time to swap to the final disc for the final 2 polishes.
We're going to start off with the white polish there are two ways to use this.
You can either run it onto the wheel when it's spinning around
or you can actually just rub some onto the metal. Obviously the metal is
quite warm so when you put this on it does tend to melt a bit. But if you just
put some on there and then clean it off with a grinder that will give you
a good finish.
You can see we've got a really good finish on that now we're just going to swap over to the
blue polishing compound.
You can see that that has given us a mirror-like finish and it is dependent
on the amount of time you are prepared to spend doing the polishing. This isn't
for an important job so I'm not spending that much time on it. I'm
just trying to demonstrate how easy it is to polish metal at home using an angle
grinder and the polishing kit. I hope this video has been useful if it has and
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