Polishing Stainless Steel with Vibratory Tumbler

[repoman]

Does anyone have some recommendations for specific media or process to polish stainless steel to a high shine?
I have a vibratory tumbler and I'm attempting to polish/finish some stainless steel stampings, the stampings have minor scratches on them I would like to remove or mitigate and have them achieve a reasonable shine.

I have used some ceramic triangle media, I ran the tumbler for about 12 hours and all this did was stain the stampings with a dark blackish residue and it did not seem to do anything for removal of fine scratches. I tried a small round porcelain media as well which did nothing.

Any ideas here?

 

[Eddyde]

I would try a softer medium like walnut shells or corncob and use an abrasive. If you want a high shine and remove scratches you might need to polish them in stages.

 

[Ulma Doctor]

Black sand or carborundum grit may be helpful

 

[mmcmdl]

For a high shine you may want to look into electropolishing . Wasn't expensive to send stuff out in the old days , not sure about now . Stainless came out looking like a mirror .

 

[repoman]

Thanks for the advice.

For a high shine you may want to look into electropolishing . Wasn't expensive to send stuff out in the old days , not sure about now . Stainless came out looking like a mirror .

Do you use local shops and just pop in to explain what you'd want done? Every time I've looked up job shops on google they tend to never even reply for small order stuff RFQs.

 

[mmcmdl]

We would have all stainless passivated and electropolished . The smaller shops were always taking on work in my area . Not sure if things have changed though . In any case , these parts came back immaculate looking . I do know that government regulations shut down a few of these smaller shops .

 

[aliva]

I wouldn't think a tumbler would give a good polish. I've polished SS to a mirror shine using a cotton wheel on a bench grinder and red jeweler's rouge. If you have many pieces it will be tedious.

 

[woodchucker]

ive never gotten a polish from a vibratory polisher. I have ceramic, plastic, walnut, media.. The plastic and walnut don't seem to do much polishing, just cleaning.. the ceramic dulls everything, but it does debur.

 

[Boswell]

While I have never used a vibratory tumbler, I wonder if it works much different from a drum tumbler. HERE is a link to a thread I posted on my process for getting highly polished aluminum and brass parts in a drum tumbler. I would think that you will need to run considerable longer times with Stainless Steel and possibly it might not even work. In fact the final step with aluminum and brass is to tumble with Stainless Steel so not sure how that would work to polish stainless steel. hopefully this might give you some ideas.