What are Buffing Compounds and Their Uses

What is Buffing?

"Buffing" is the process of giving shine to metal, wood, or composites employing a cloth wheel impregnated. The buffing material holds or carries the compound while the compound does the cutting.

Buffing generally requires two operations, a cut buff, and a finish buff. Even the cut buff, which is the coarsest buffing operation, is just too fine for removal of pits, course abrasive polishing lines, or

deep scratches. This is why surface preparation before buffing is a critical aspect.

Excellent pre-buff surface preparation starts with using the best abrasive belt that production will allow. 

What are Buffing Compounds?

Buffing compounds are used to Buffing wheel and polish wheels to extend their effectiveness and help you accomplish your tasks more quickly. They are available altogether differing types and colors, each uniquely suited to an unusual aspect of the buffing, cutting, and polishing process.

Some are rougher and can quickly remove scratches from various metal surfaces, while some are gentler and designed to supply a gorgeous and shining finish to your work. 

Here is the list of Buffing Compounds to help you tell the difference and choose the one that's right for you.

Black Emery Compound

This compound is crammed with emery minerals to offer top-notch cutting qualities, making it the right compound for removing scratches, small pits, plating, paint, antiquing, lacquer, and more from metallic surfaces. For giant jobs and work that needs tons of labor to get rid of rough surfaces or deep scratches, you ought to always start with this compound because it'll prevent hours of labor and energy. This Black Emery Compound creates the polishing process for you, typically leaving metals with a good shine on the surface once you are done.

 Greystar

Greystar is meant for general purpose use; it's a superb cut while bringing out the right color all metals. Gray Buffing Compound features a medium grade composition with fine and uniform abrasives. It's great for quick and efficient removal of the fire scale—best used on chrome steel with a more rigid wheel.

Brown Tripoli

This tripoli compound is meant for its general purpose use for both buffing and polishing work. The Brown Tripoli Compound can easily cut and take away scratches while leaving a smooth finish. It's the simplest compound to use on softer metals like brass, copper, aluminum, and various pot metals. It can also be safely used on chrome steel and wood surfaces, giving the wood a lustrous finish once you are done.

White Rouge

White rouge compounds are an excellent finishing compound, particularly for harder metals like chrome and nickel-plated things. This White Rouge Buffing Compound provides a light-weight level of the leading edge to your wheel, giving those harder metals an excellent shine once you are finished. Also referred to as a blizzard compound and is often used to provide a final finish to harder metals or lighter cutting action on softer ones.

Water Soluble Red Rouge

This compound works within the same way that regular red rouge will: it gives an outstanding top quality polished finish to the metals that you use it with, and it's especially significant to be used on gold, silver, and other precious metals. What makes this compound unique from a typical red rouge is that it's also water-soluble, so it breaks down far more efficiently and maybe cleaned away just with water assistance.

Red Rouge/Jeweler's Rouge

The red rouge compound is usually mentioned as jeweler's rouge because it's used extensively by jewelers. The unsurpassed level of top quality polishing provides gold, silver, and lots of other precious metals. This Jewelers Rouge  Buffing will reveal every metal's true colors and shine like new in little or no time. It's also safe to use on pieces that have thin layers of plating.

Green Rouge

This green rouge may be a compound designed to supply a high luster finish on hard and soft metals. While this compound can quickly and safely be used on hard and soft metals, it works best on chrome, chrome steel, and platinum, which is why this compound is sometimes understood as a chrome steel compound. It'll leave a brighter and better finish than you'll get with a white rouge compound.

Tan Bobbing Compound

The tan bobbing compound is understood for its fast cutting action, making quick work of removing light scratches and things like fire-scale from metal. It's a perfect pre-polishing compound, quickly smoothing the surface of valuable metals like gold and silver to ready the surface for polishing. It works best when it's used with a wheel, brush, and lap work machine.

Polinum

Polinum may be a rouge that's commonly referred to as Orange-Glow. It is often a specialty compound designed to permit you to shine platinum, alloy, yellow gold, and chrome steel. It provides an intense polishing action that produces a fantastic sparkling gloss to your metals. Originally designed to be used on watch cases and watch bands, Polinum is great for watchmakers and is usually employed by Rolex repairmen to bring a watch copy to its original luster.

Blue Magic

This compound was engineered only for performing on platinum. It provides an unmatched polishing shine to platinum jewelry and metals, giving other precious metals like gold a gorgeous glimmer.

Fabulustre

Fabulustre may be a unique and special one step buffing and polishing compound. It had been designed to supply a high luster finish to all sorts of precious metals from gold to silver and other decorative metals. The compound easily removes light scratches to provide a mirror-bright final finish to your workpiece in no time in the least without discoloring while you're employed.

Zam

Zam is another specialty compound designed uniquely for performing on silver and turquoise jewelry. The unique formulation is gentle and can not scratch the fragile stones, making it ideal to use on jewelry that you got to polish but couldn't easily remove the stones to guard them against harsher polishing compounds. It leaves a high luster finish without a residue making it a flexible polishing compound.

Conclusion

The construction of the buff becomes important to the desired performance; therefore it is important to match the construction of the buff to the workpiece. For a perfect finished abrasive product, better knowledge of buffing compounds is important.