After dinner last night, I showed my wife the ingots after I had gone over them with the carbide fly cutter.
My wife said, “looks nice, but why aren’t the corners even with the rest?” My daughter, viewing them with not as nearly a critical an eye, simply said “they look shiny, Daddy!”.
So I resolved to fix the problem with morning before going further. I took yesterday’s lesson to heart about deburring the edges after fly cutting each face, discovering that the ingots fit in much more level, making it possible to fly cut much more evently.
However, because I had cut unevenly yesterday as a result of not deburring, I found I had to do some rather creative shimming in order to restore each level surface.
That being said, I addressed my wife’s concerns about the unevenness, and removed some gouge marks that I had introduced by mistake, at the cost of perhaps another .005 inches thickness total in each ingot. Now I had a pair of ingots that were about .070 to .075 inch thick overall with a few thousandths of variation, as shown below:
Yesterday's ingots after touching up with morning again with fly cutter
Touched up ingots, reverse sides...
A few weeks ago I had been thinking about my procedure for finishing silver. I knew I had to make best use of my time and so I really did not want to even try sanding and polishing by hand. However, I could not afford any conventional type of sanding station such as a belt sander. So what I did instead was to buy a handheld power sander on clearance from Home Depot (costing only $15 USD), and mount it upside down on clamps. This sander had a catcher for dust, and locks for holding the sandpaper in place. Result: a micro-sized sanding and polishing station!
I have found it actually reasonably safe for me to use this way… it’s clamped, so it’s not going anywhere. And I found a way to hold the work safely against the vibrating sandpaper.
My sanding and polishing micro station...
The engraving vise jaws I created earlier came in handy again, this time as a means for safely holding the ingot in place while sanding the surface. The clamp that holds the jaws together doubles as a handle for holding the ingot against the working surface of the power sander…
Providing a handle to hold the ingot while sanding...
I spent the final hour of my morning playing with different sequences of grits. Per Orchid forums I quickly verified by experimenting that if I applied the finer grits too early, stray marks instantly appear that should have been sanded down first using coarser grits.
Next time I will have determined the proper sequence of grits necessary to prepare the ingots for etching.
But for now, here are some intermediate results!
Fine silver ingots after finishing on micro station (upside down hand sander) using 120 and 400 grit papers.
