previous next

Pol′ish-ing-wheel.

A wooden wheel covered with leather and charged with crocus, rouge, puttypowder, etc. It is used in polishing metallic articles of relatively small size which are presented to it. A coarser grade of powder, such as emery or tripoli, constitutes a grinding-wheel or glazer.

A polishing-wheel prepared from a leather dressed with oil, like chamois and buckskin, is called a buffwheel. The soft and fluffy surface is charged with polishing-powder.

The cutler's polishing-wheel has a wooden center, is covered with leather, and charged with crocus, used dry. It has a speed of 70 to 80 feet per second. The development of heat by friction improves the polish, and the blade is moved to and fro, from end to end, by a quick motion. Skill and practice, it is almost needless to observe, are necessary in this as in all other manipulations. The hand is protected from the heat by a piece of felt.

Polishing-wheels for small steel instruments are made as follows:—

Take a piece of sole-leather of a size suitable for the desired wheel, make a hole through the center, slip it on the mandrel of the lathe; turn it down to the size desired: coat the face of it with glue, and apply as much coarse emery as the glue can be made to take; put it aside to dry. Make another in the [1763] same way, only using flour of emery instead of the coarse. Form a third wheel in the same manner, but instead of the glue and emery, apply crocus with water. The wheels may be of any size, by fastening several thicknesses together with common shoe-pegs.

A wheel for carrying the pumice, in polishing vulcanite, can be formed by fastening together two of these leather wheels with brass screws, between which are three or four thicknesses of woolen cloth cut somewhat larger than the leathers.

1877.

Tufts University provided support for entering this text.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: