Nice work!
The fewer times you have to go over a surface, the flatter you will keep that surface (speaking in terms of filing and polishing)
So a rough/coarse cut file takesof matrl quickly and levels the area with just a few strokes. That's what you want to do.
Then you finish up with Sharp, finer cut files and then the grit cloth.
I stress Sharp files too. Dull files are the same as using a fine cut file to remove alot of material.
You spend a lot of time going over and over the same area. In that time you gradually round over edges or take the area down less than perfectly than you want to. More work
Polishing with grit cloth will round edges just as well so matter what you use to back it up.
The cloth has a thickness and that thickness rolls itself ever so slightly as it is stroked across the surfaces,,,back and forth. No matter how tightly you hold it wrapped around a stick, file or other backer.
The clean sharp edges get slightly rounded over. They just do.
The clean sharp edges on factory polishing is from belt grinder work mostly. The final polishes are/were done with hard leather faced wheels at high surface speed.
Very little metal surface to belt/wheel time involved so less chances of rounded over edges .
But it takes a lot of experience,,,one reason the polishers were among the highest paid labor in the factories at one time.
It's easy to ruin a piece on a belt or wheel. It's also not very likely the average shop can have available all the necessary contoured wheels and size belts in all of the grits necessary for every gun out there so that they can all be redone correctly.
That's the reason some restoration shops do some guns and refuse to do others. Some configurations just easier to do that's all.
DA revolvers are not in the easy to do catagory.
Lots of odd contours makes for a lot of specially shaped wheels for each. plus one for each Grit when polishing.
No using the same wheel with different grit. A different wheel contoured the same for each step up in grit. Start at 80,,go up to 1000 and more
You've got a big room full of polishing wheels even if you just want to do S&W J,K & N revolvers.
Belts are great for flats and round circumferances (cylinders).
Round bbls can be spin polished if the grit lines going around agree with the restoration being done,,or it's just a reblue and that doesn't matter.
But again it's easy to dish out the flutes when doing a cyl on a belt if the polisher doesn't vary hand pressure over them.
You will dive into and back out of the flute on the belt (using the round backer wheel). That will cut the edges of the flute down going out towards the front of the cylinder.
The results can be spectacular with sharp edges all around if done right. Or a completely trashed piece in a few moments.
Keep up the good work. It's not an easy trade, but it's one that I feel brings a lot of satisfaction.
Without a precise polish job, all the other gunsmithing and glitter done to put a special project together seems to fall apart.
