My brother just called me about a tumble polisher that a friend has. It is in good shape and I can get it cheap of free. It has about a 18" diameter x 24" barrel. What kinds of parts can I use this for? Any thoughts? Neal
[ QUOTE ] There excellent for polishing rocks! Shoe [/ QUOTE ] I know that, but I have heard they can be used for metal polishing also, even deburring with diffenent media I think. This particular one had been used for polishing silverware. Neal
Silverware? Or Stainless? They work great for deburring parts in mass production,never heard of using one for polishing metal.But if they work for polishing rocks,it should be possible. Do a search for "tumble polishing" and see what happens.
[ QUOTE ] Silverware? Or Stainless? [/ QUOTE ] Stainless flatware, I should have said. I heard a toy truck restorer say that he has the small aluminum or potmetal wheels "tumble polished", that is where I got the idea. I was thinking I might be able to polish carburetor parts or other small hard to polish parts. I will search the web, I was just hoping someone had first hand experience.
Tumble polishers can be used to polish all shorts of materials. It takes a media to mix in with them and the type will depend on the material your cutting or the finish you require. You can also use these to remove rust and sharp edges. Thery work pretty slick. Takes time to do the work though. A couple hour run won't do much. takes a few days sometimes depending on the project you require.
When I was a kid I worked in a Pachinko (Japanese pinball) parlor. We used a very large tumbler to polish the balls. These were actually ball bearings of about 1/4" diameter. We'd load about 100,000 at a time into the big drum, toss in a couple of handfuls of rouge powder, some rags and let her roll. This place was on an east coast beach and open to the salt air so the balls rusted quickly. No matter how rusty they were going in they came out shiny. The thing to remember about tumblers is they smooth rough objects. Defined corners will disappear. Aside from loose bearings I can't imagine what other auto stuff you could improve with a tumbler.
neal hi if you have a ton of old nuts and bolts in cans like I do, that could clean em up real nice, after a couple days anyway. it would look great in the back of your truck anyway... travis aka zibo
Nealin, these polishers work very well, but they will give you a different finnish look than a buffer. It's not a bad look but just different, I happen to like it, you can then put clear on it for a neat look.--TV
I think if you're gonna use a tumble polisher on something like a manifold where you want to polish some parts, but leave other like the carb mating area, or the port to head area untouched, then you'll have to make up some masks that are harder than the manifold. I know that if I leave a bucket of rusty hardware in a five gallon steel bucket with a couple gallons of diesel and coarse sand or worn-out black beauty in the back of the truck while I drive around for a month, the hardware comes out looking great!
Another old codger friend used a drum tumbler on all the nuts, bolts and screws, just filled it with baking soda and let it run for a few hours. Presto! Nice shiny hardware. I'm building one with a replaceable 5 gallon bucket, and the fan motor out of a kerosene heater. I have drawers full of old hardware that I plan to tumble and sort. Save everything, you never know when you might need to go out an find some funky, one-of-a-kind screw... Like Eddie Murphy or Hugh Grant.
I'm a body piercer for a living, and I make my own body jewelry. Tumblers work GREAT for polishing metal. You can get just as good of a polish as a buffer, only without all the swirl marks. The trick is to use a couple different types of media (in different stages, not together). Start with a ceramic tumbling media to burnish the edges (if the parts are pretty rough), then go with the steel media (nuts and bolts would work ok, but they'll rust), and then finish up with cob meal (the stuff reloaders use to polish brass)treated with jewelers rouge. I throw a step of abrasive impregnated plastic in between the ceramic and steel ( I use stainless) steps, but my stuff needs a mirror finish. I don't think you'd need it.
We use a vibratory polisher all the time. That is slow, but great. Tumblers are much slower. You'll have to leave pieces in there for days. but that doesn't particularly matter, it's easy and gets into all the tricky places too. They will give you a nice smooth finish, nothing as bright as a buff, but smooth enough you can finish by hand in minutes with a good polish. Great for brass, bronze and aluminum, slow on steel. forget it on stainless. What I like most, it makes great storage while I'm polishing other gear, and they cost very little to run.
[ QUOTE ] forget it on stainless. [/ QUOTE ] I have to STRONGLY disagree. I ONLY use mine on stainless and it works incredibly. It just takes a little trial and error to get the type of media and cycle times right.
Many years ago I worked in a restaurant that had a stainless steel drum tumble polisher about the same size as the one you described. About once a month they would dump all the stainless flatware (spoons, forks, knives) in there along with some thick detergent type liguid. There was about 5 gallons of 3/8" diam ball bearings in the tumbler and you'd let it slowly run overnight (it was pretty noisy) and the next day all the flatware had a nice soft polish to it. It worked well. I heard that they were not uncommon in some restaurants. In Worcester Mass at the Norton Abrasives factory (BIG abrasives, grinding wheel and sandpaper manufacturer) in the early 80's that had HUGE tumblers (like 15 feet by 8 feet in size) where they could clean/polish large castings using these kind of pyramid shaped, sugar cube sized abrasive ceramic cubes. When the cubes got a little worn out they gave them to some employees who put them down on their driveways like you might do with pea-stone. Apparently some local kids/teens found out that if you flicked/threw one of these cubes at a storefront plate glass window or at a car window or windshield, that it's jagged ceramic coating would catch the glass just right and dig into the glass and just spider the glass full of cracks (on some store windows it cracked/spidered the glass into many, many small sections, then the glass would totally collapse). The newspapers wrote up the incidents which the kids called "cubing" a window. It got kind of bad for a while until the cubes were removed from the few driveways that they had been placed on.
neil, did you get the polisher? how does it work? i kept this saved so i could ask after you've had it for a a while; now it's been a while.
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