[Jewelry making - Article 00958] - Re: [Orchid] Holding metal while finishing

[Peter W . Rowe]

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>     Gloves and rotary equipment are a recipe for lost fingers and
>     severe hand damage. Do not ever wear gloves while using polishing
>     motors, drill presses, lathes etc. If you want the protection then
>     cut the fingers off the glove and where only the fingers but even
>     that can be problematic if it grabs the glove finger tip and it
>     doesn't come off cleanly. It is just not safe. 

    I'll second that thought. The single worst accident in the jewelry
    industry I ever actually saw was a guy, new to polishing, who was
    wearing light cotten (photo type) gloves while polishing a bangle
    bracelet. The bracelet caught on the buff, and the glove caught
    between the bracelet and the buff went with it. The kids entire first
    finger stayed in the glove. surgeons weren't able to reattach it. Too
    badly mangled when ripped from his hand. Granted, he was doing
    everything wrong, polishing this bangle with a buff small enough to
    pull inside the bangle, just barely, plus he was buffing across the
    wire, not in it's direction, AND he had that finger hooked through
    the bracelet, rather than holding it in a pinch grip. But it seemed
    certain to the doctors and others nearby that he might not have lost
    the finger had the glove not been there too. Who knows. But they make
    it harder to fully control where everything is and how it's held.
    Dealing with the heat of polishing is the least important of the
    issues. Safety, and remember that the surface of a modest sized buff
    can be moving at 60 miles an hour without too much trouble, plus the
    inertia of a powerful motor behind that speed, and it's more
    important to protect your hands from all that energy than the heat of
    buffing. Once you've addressed those issues, and know you're safe
    with them, then worry about the heat. Finger cots, extending not past
    the first knuckle, will pull off easily enough if caught that they
    are safe. Buy them or cut the finger tips off gloves to make them. 

    Other useful methods: 

    For smaller flat shapes, especially if you're doing many of the same
    item, benefit from a polishing jig or nest. Take one piece, and heat
    it hot enough to let it burn it's way slightly into a block of wood.
    That depression will now nicely house the pieces while that hard to
    hold surface is buffed. Small things like pendants or things with
    jump rings or the like can be have one end of an unfolded paper clip
    (bend to an S shape hook) put through the hole to hang onto it, while
    you hold the other end of the paper clip and support the work,
    pressing it to the buff with a small bit of heavy leather or wood, or
    the like. Strips of leather can be wrapped around the outside of a
    finger ring to provide insulation while you polish the inside finger
    hole of a ring. That operation heats up a ring fast, so the
    insulation helps a lot. Plus, if the ring jams on the finger shaped
    buff, as they sometimes do, the suddenly spinning ring will be
    hitting the leather while you pull your hand away in surprise, not
    milling its way through your finger tip. For a lot of general
    polishing, though, just be prepared to take a break for a moment when
    the work starts to get uncofortably hot. Most likely, your dust
    collector will have a screen over it's intake to keep things from
    being sucked into the dust collector. Resting the hot work for a
    moment or two on that screen, puts it into a fairly strong air flow,
    which will quickly cool it again, ready for more buffing. Or work on
    more than one item at a time, and switch back and forth as they heat
    up. 

    You may also find that different buffs, and different buffing
    compounds, differ in the degree to which they heat up the work. Some
    compounds seem to work with less friction for a given amount of
    cutting. I happen to prefer and use the somewhat aggressive platinum
    polishing compounds for most of my buffing work, in part for this
    reason. Based on aluminum oxide abrasive, finely graded, these
    compounds cut faster than tripoli, and seem to heat up less. They
    also offer the advantage of solving the problem of solder seams in
    some types of metals (white gold in particular) seeming to polish out
    leaving lines. The buffing compounds are aggressive enough that
    differences in hardness in the metal seem to cause few problems.
    However, for the same reason, they may not be appropriate when
    buffing things with softer stones (facet edges on softer stones can
    get rounded over). And another product you may wish to try are the 3m
    radial bristle brushes. No compound needed, it's built in to the
    brush. Graded abrasives, so the coarser grades can be quite
    aggressive, evem more so that bobbing compound, while the finest
    grades can almost replace rouge. Less messy to use, and the open
    bristled brush structure creates a strong airflow along the surface
    of the work so it really doesn't heat up much. Try them. You might
    like them. 

Hope that helps.
Peter
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