Cleaning up castings

[Gordon WParticipant @gordonw]

The trouble with leaving castings in the rough so as to follow full size practice is that the imperfections will be well out of scale ?

[Sub MandrelParticipant @submandrel]

Depends on the quality of the castings – those from Polly are amazingly sharp and well finished on the whole. Reeves are more hit and miss.

 

Neil

[John Wood1Participant @johnwood1]

OK, thanks guys. I ended up getting the really rough high bits off with a small grinding wheel in an electric drill (outdoors mounted on a Workmate) and for general smoothing I tried out my two sets of Dremmel style grinding/polishing kits, just to see how they performed. One was low power and kept stopping under load and the other had decent power but a very poor button arrangement to stop the chuck turning whilst tightening on a tool, result….the tool kept working out. It did however prove to me that this approach was what I needed and so I have splashed out on a Dremmel 4000 kit which, so far, is excellent.

 

I considered leaving the castings in the rough for authenticity and realised that a totally smooth finish may look a bit out of place so I have gone somewhere in between, the resulting painted look is, in my opinion about right.

 

Thanks again for all the advice. Now I’m battling with turning the darn’d flywheels!!

 

John

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