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About the topic
Since the industrial revolution, buff and compound makers have been working diligently to create the finest technology possible. Their goal was to create a product to give a buffed mirror finish that could be plated, painted or coated in some method with less cost and effort. While many of these organizations have developed treatments to firm the cloth or to hold the spray-on compound with more effectiveness, they did not eliminate the need for additional cost and mess from the application of significant compound.
All of us in the finishing industry have dreamed of a product that could achieve this same mirror finish without the mess and cost of the abrasive compound. Well that time has finally arrived with the pending introduction of the Norton Abrasive Fixed Abrasive Buff (FAB).
With incredible technology from the world’s top R&D lab in abrasives, the Saint-Gobain abrasive scientists from Northboro MA have found a way to place abrasives on specialized cloth, in a way that produces single-digit Ra finishes on nearly every substrate tested.
While this technology has focused mostly on the widely used mush buffing process on automatic and semi-automatic equipment, it has also done superb on tangential buffing on substrates such as aluminum, brass, and zinc. We have seen this buff process brass parts, that have been prepped with a 280 grit A/O belt, to a final Ra of 3 to 4.
The incredible part is keeping in mind that this finish was obtained without an additional abrasive compound. The fine water spray was used to keep the surface temperature of the buff low enough to keep the risk of fire at near zero opportunity.
The non-woven cloth has been treated with patented process using specific mixtures of abrasive grains, in various micron sizes, that will remove the pre-polish finish and leave the surface of steel, stainless steel, Inconel, titanium, brass, aluminum, copper, and zinc with single digit Ra readings. These substrates can be found in many industries including aerospace, aluminum wheels, automotive, plumbing, and door harware, as well as many others.
With post finishing operations such as nickel/chrome plating being common, we have seen abrasive prepped parts and raw part that are buffed with only the Fixed Abrasive buff and H2O, give a completely acceptable finish for one of the top plumbing manufacturers in the USA.
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When the test customers wanted a higher gloss in the final finish, we found that we could reduce their current compound usage by as much as 90% to give the gloss (from the fats/greases of the liquid compound) that they requested and still show massive savings. The savings came from the cost of compound, the cost of compound delivery systems (pumps, guns, tips, needles, etc.) and the cost of cleaning the compound (physically cleaning and chemically cleaning in their plating systems. This is to say nothing of the high cost of compound delivery; which adds no value to the buffing process.
While the upfront cost of the FAB may be higher than current product, due to the additional coating, the fact that none, or very little of the expensive compound will be needed throughout the buffing process, shows massive savings in many of the test sites.
When we review overall buffing costs, we often see that the cost of the buff can be greatly overshadowed by the high cost of the compound sprayed on the buff throughout the life of the process. In one example, we showed how the Fixed Abrasive buff was able to buff a brass part, on a semi-automatic buffing system; using 90% less compound (they did not want to use just water to gain a slight gloss on the part surface) and we showed nearly a $100,000 per year savings due to the impressive savings on compound.
These direct compound savings did not include savings from the fact that the compound pumps, guns, and tips will now last 10x longer due to the massive compound reduction. For a large compound-using machine, this could be an additional $5,000 to $7,000 in annual costs.
Meet your presenter
Mike Shappell is the Senior Application Engineer at Norton/Saint-Gobain Abrasives.