Different Types of Metal Surface Finishing Tools
Surface finishing is a process of cleaning, polishing, and improving metal surfaces.
Why Metal Surface Finishing is Important?
The surface finishing is important to make metals shine and smooth as well as to reduce roughness, provide extra protection against the environment, and store it safely. There are various metal finishing tools used to get clean and burr-free metal surfaces.
Surface finishing tools are essential and used for industrial, DIY, and household purposes. The metal surface finishing techniques include grinding, deburring, sanding, cleaning, and buffing.
Types of Metal Surface Finishing Tools
There are various professional metal cutting tools and abrasives available to fulfill the metal surface finishing applications.
Cartridge Rolls
Cartridge Rolls are mainly used for surface finishing and deburring applications. It works great for blending, cutting, and light grinding on ferrous metals. The long cylindrical shape enables to use for cleaning and finishing corners, contours, and other hard-to-reach areas. They are found mostly in two shapes i.e square cartridge rolls and tapered cartridge rolls.
Cross Pads
The abrasives with cross-shaped designs are called cross pads for finishing and polishing the tubes, internal threads, tight spaces, etc. It has a flexible square shape that is beneficial to clean the contact areas. Easy to attach with mandrel and use with power tools for metal polishing, deburring, finishing, and other applications. They are available in different grit sizes ranging from 60 to 120.
Convolute Deburring Wheel
These deburring wheels help in stock removal and metal surface finishing greatly. The non-woven material with bonded abrasive grains ensures a rigid structure for rapid stock removal. Heat-resistant deburring wheels give a consistent finish.
Flap Discs
They are mostly used for aggressive cutting and finishing the surface in a single action. Flap discs are ideal metal finishing tools made with premium bonded grains and adhered with R type of backing. The easy and quick change features allow using this disc for sanding and finishing purposes on a wide variety of materials.
Flap Wheels
Flap wheels are designed for grinding and finishing in corners and tubes. It is very useful to shape, clean, and finish the contours. They are mostly made of aluminum oxide abrasive material. These wheels are suitable for deburring, cleaning, blending metals, and a few other materials.
What is Metal Surface Preparation Tools?
The color-coded non-woven wheels are ideal metal surface preparation tools, applied for the finishing metals including stainless steel, non-ferrous metals, and alloys. The surface preparation tools are widely utilized for blending, polishing, cleaning, and other industrial applications. The surface preparation wheels are easy to use with water or solvents.
Types of Metal Surface Preparation Tools
Cotton buffing wheels and interleaf flap disc are the two most common metal surface preparation tools.
Cotton Buffing Wheels
Lightweight buffing wheels are designed to clean, polish, and finish the metal surface with lesser effort. These wheels are great for polishing and buffing works. The wheels are sewn tightly to give it a harder structure that holds it during the buffing process.
Interleaf Flap Disc
The interleaf flap discs are generally used when grinding and finishing are required at one process. It produces a consistent and uniform finish on various surfaces. It is ideal to use on aluminum, stainless steel, sheet metal, etc. The design of the flap disc is effective to provide a mirror-like finish on most of the surfaces.