Tumblers are convenient, but people tend to leave everything to
tumbler, and that is not the way to the professional finish.
I’ll second that thought, as well as the rest of Leonid’s post. For
people having trouble getting a good polish, especially in hard to
reach areas, well, read Leonid’s post twice.
Polishing is the last step in getting a good finish, not the whole
one. If you do things right along the way, then the final polish
won’t make you tear your hair out. If it is difficult to get that
desired final finish, the problem is not with polishing in many
cases, but in how you prepared the work for polishing, or
anticipated the need for polishing as you made the work.
If you find during polishing that there are file marks or scuffs or
grinding marks or coarse sanding marks that are difficult to polish
out, then the problem is not with polishing, but with not doing a
proper job of prefinishing, ie fine files and finer and finer
abrasives to get a nicely prepared and refined surface before you
ever get near to a buff.
It is possible, even with silver but even more with gold or platinum
or other metals, to prepolish everything, and have it remain, even
after multiple soldering operations, still almost polished at the
end, needing just a little touch up. If you have trouble with fire
scale or fire stain giving you a hard time with polishing, then learn
how to prevent it from forming in the first place. Proper use of
prips flux (check the many past posts in the archives) is one way to
do this. There are others as well. (and a side note, the common use
of boric acid and alcohol, as used for preventing fire scale on
gold, does NOT work well on silver. It helps, but does not fully
prevent fire stain in particular.) If you want a really effective and
easy preventative, then spend the money of Firescoff, that new
ceramic based commercial spray on product. Works well, so long as
cost is not an issue. Prips flux is a bit more work, but since you
make it yourself, it’s very cheap. And used properly, it works as
well as anything else on the market, including Firescoff for
preventing fire stain and fire scale on sterling silver.
If you find little blind areas with excess solder or solder scars or
scuffs or marks that you can’t polish, the real answer is not to look
for other polishing tools, but rather to pay more attention to not
getting those defects in the first place. The extra time you spend on
that, will be more than repaid in the time you then save in final
finishing.
Now, with all that said, there will still be times that things go
wrong and you have to fix mistakes that should not have happened. A
couple thoughts on that. Be careful not to assume that you need a
motor behind every tool. Rotary tools in a flex shaft can be
wonderful, but they also can make circular swirl marks in that
otherwise nice clean square corner. Burnishers can be made of the
old broken burs and drills you may have around, and shaped to get
into virtually any tiny space. Same thing with things like scotch
stones (water of ayre stones is another name for them. Very useful
fine slate like abrasive stones). Or toothpicks with a bit of polish
compound or a bit of lapping paste or other abrasive on them can get
into tiny details, either under power or just rubbed manually. Cotton
swabs can also be tiny soft buffs in the flex shaft.
Or if these sorts of things don’t work, don’t be afraid to change
the game plan. If you cannot polish a recessed defect, then how about
changing the finish from polish to some texture, perhaps with a small
chasing tool, or a tiny sharp pointed bit in a vibro graver, or
sand/bead blast. Or just (with silver) a black oxidized finish. Or
add some small ornament. Or pierce it out. Etc. Etc.
As Leonid suggests, jewelry making can be like cooking. While many
times one follows the predetermined recipe, most cooks are not shy
about modifying it when it suits their taste buds… And if you come
up against something that doesn’t want to work within your skills and
the state of the piece that you’ve reached, don’t be too stubborn
about it. You don’t have to tilt at the windmill. It’s Ok to walk
around it instead.
And please, folks. Polishing machines are found in virtually all
professional jewelry workshops for a reason. They’re often the best
tool for the job. Don’t let them scare you. Used right, they do
things you can never do with a tumbler or flex shaft. If you avoid
using that big noisy thing just because it scares you, but then
think your tumbler is giving you a wonderful finish, well, perhaps
you’re happy with that. But understand that you may be simply
deciding to accept an easy but limited solution. If the finish a
tumbler can give you is the RIGHT finish for the piece, then
wonderful. If, instead, it’s the lazy finish because you don’t want
to go through the process of properly polishing it when that polished
finish would be the best end result, well, you need to at least
recognize that for what it is. You put all the work and effort into
making your artwork in the first place. Make your decisions on finish
based on the aesthetic needs of the piece, not on whether the
polishing machine happens to be noisy or dusty. (If those are the
problems, find a way to solve them. It’s not hard.) Take your jewelry
and it’s design and process of making as seriously as you’d like your
customers or viewers to take the pieces themselves.
Peter Rowe
At those times, I use my flexshaft with 3M