Okay. Long story short, ed I spent half of the day Saturday(2/6/10)working on a single key with the bench grinder buffer until factoid finally realized that I had been using the wrong buffing compound. It was a laugh for him, treatment but it only made me mad. so we walked down to Baller Hardware and got another type of compound(this one was brown), and it worked a little better, but it was messy, and soon we had brown splatters all over one of the walls. I spent the rest of my day working with this. At the end of the day, I was still working on the same piece when factoid came over and said that it wasn’t the compound, it was the machine I was using. Another laugh for him. So Sunday(2/7/10)I started using another tool that maybe is not as easy as the bench grinder, but definetely faster. Here are a few pictures of me using it.
picture #1-This is a picture of me using the new tool.
picture #2This is a good shot of the tool itself. As you may have noticed, we have built our own custom jig to hold the metal piece in place.
picture #3-This is a picture of a half-finished key.
Actually, it was a combination of a bunch of things slowing us down: The oxidization on the aluminum was tougher than either of the polishing compounds we were using. The wire wheel got rid of it, but also roughed up the surface too much for it to be polished. But in rummaging around in the toolbox, I found a plastic-based stripping wheel with a light abrasive – and that (fitted to the drill) did the trick. It gets off the corrosion, and then looks pretty nice when followed up with a cotton wheel impregnated with polishing compound.