Untitled Gardening Project #16

The small discs are fully machined. The finished... thingies... will stay indoors and don't need to worry about abrasion resistance or heavy-duty durability. There's no need for plating, anodizing, or clearcoating the final finish.

Polishing can be done by hand or by vibratory tumbling. Hand polishing is 'faster' but labor intensive. Vibratory tumbling requires a long period of time, but almost no labor and minimal supervision.

The first polishing step runs the discs in 'green' [medium coarse] wet-media silicon carbide triangles at max setting for 24 hours. This deburs, removes all tooling marks, and intentionally rounds off the edges of the discs. Although 16 discs will fit in the hopper at once, they'll tend to 'stack up' in one big mass with no media between. For this reason, polish eight at a time, requiring 12 days total.

The original, directly tooled surface is shiny but fragile. The tiny grooves from turning and milling have sharp, thin edges that show scratches easily and collect dirt. The first polishing step transforms this into a smooth, dull matte surface devoid of tooling marks. It may not look like forward progress, but it's substantially smoother than the tooled surface, more durable, and closer to a mirror finish than it appears.