Silverado21
New member
- Jul 29, 2012
- 4
- 0
So my most recent job I'm a finishing electrical technician at a company that builds aluminum tanks trailers for fuel, water, oil, you name-it-liquid. Apparently as a electrical technician part of my job entails fixing scratches on new tanks sanding and polishing.
A little background. When I started we had grits ranging from 50-600 and only one kind of polish. a Liquid f-1 fine metal polish( I have a pic of the bottle somewhere.) We have a dewalt rotary with rouge and accompanying supplies to use it. After spending a day or two trying to figure the rouge system out I completely gave up. No one knows how to use it. It doesn't give the results our QC dept. wants. The way that everyone knows how to polish our tanks is by hand. Lemme splain to you the way they taught me how to do this.
Our tanks have a slight "grain" to it from the manufacturing process and all sanded areas should "blend" in and can not be mirror finish.
Step one: decide if scratch needed to be filled with weld
Step two: sand said scratch with 100 grit sand paper with a pneumatic r/a palm sander
Step three: sand with 400 grit sand paper again with r/a palm sander
Step four: sand with 600 grit r/a sander
Step five: spend next hour polishing by hand with a rag and fine polish.
If anyone of you have worked with aluminum before you know that this "method" would take for ever and not give great results.
I have changed my way of doing this by eliminating the 100 grit and just going straight to 400 grit. I have also requested finer sand paper (800, 1000, 1500) as well requested coarse compound and wool pads and backing plate for dewalt rotary. My supervisor ended up ordering 3M coarse compound (for paint) which actually works really well on aluminum. I kind of have the hang of using my method with the rotary. But it is leaving the swirls which is frowned upon and not wanted.
My question is: How could I polish a sanded section of a tank while leaving a grain and blending it all in so it's less noticeable? Hand polishing has by far the best results and I can get it so it's barely noticeable.
If you've read through this thank you for your time.
A little background. When I started we had grits ranging from 50-600 and only one kind of polish. a Liquid f-1 fine metal polish( I have a pic of the bottle somewhere.) We have a dewalt rotary with rouge and accompanying supplies to use it. After spending a day or two trying to figure the rouge system out I completely gave up. No one knows how to use it. It doesn't give the results our QC dept. wants. The way that everyone knows how to polish our tanks is by hand. Lemme splain to you the way they taught me how to do this.
Our tanks have a slight "grain" to it from the manufacturing process and all sanded areas should "blend" in and can not be mirror finish.
Step one: decide if scratch needed to be filled with weld
Step two: sand said scratch with 100 grit sand paper with a pneumatic r/a palm sander
Step three: sand with 400 grit sand paper again with r/a palm sander
Step four: sand with 600 grit r/a sander
Step five: spend next hour polishing by hand with a rag and fine polish.
If anyone of you have worked with aluminum before you know that this "method" would take for ever and not give great results.
I have changed my way of doing this by eliminating the 100 grit and just going straight to 400 grit. I have also requested finer sand paper (800, 1000, 1500) as well requested coarse compound and wool pads and backing plate for dewalt rotary. My supervisor ended up ordering 3M coarse compound (for paint) which actually works really well on aluminum. I kind of have the hang of using my method with the rotary. But it is leaving the swirls which is frowned upon and not wanted.
My question is: How could I polish a sanded section of a tank while leaving a grain and blending it all in so it's less noticeable? Hand polishing has by far the best results and I can get it so it's barely noticeable.
If you've read through this thank you for your time.
