blower arrangement. Exhaust blowers are good, because they prevent the abrasive and lint of the wheel
from settling on tools and machines in the shop.
USING POLISHING WHEELS
The most important thing to remember when working with abrasive dressed wheels is that these wheels
cut, and in cutting remove metal. Unlike hard-stone grinding wheels, the soft-back dressed wheels do
not give off a great volume of sparks, which often fools the polisher into believing that practically no
metal is being removed. Many a novice has almost ruin his first few guns to be blued by grinding hollows
into the surface of a barrel thinking that there was metal being removed.
PRACTICING ON AN OLD GUN.
Unless the gunsmith has had some experience working with this type of wheel, it would be wise to do a
bit of experimenting on an old gun. Select an old gun or receiver that is lying in the shop junk pile
preferably one with deep pits and go to work on it. If the first job is a failure, then the gunsmith will not
have to tell the customer why his favorite shotgun is not quite what it used to be. After grinding the old
gun, polish it and blue it. Bluing, as mentioned earlier, will serve to show up any hollows, deep
scratches, and round corners caused by the grinding and polishing operations.
A good ego deflator for self-satisfaction along these lines is to compare the finish on the experimental
gun alongside of the finish on a high quality firearm. Note the sharp corners on a factory-finished
weapon; also note that the flats are free of waves, ripples, and surface irregularities.
The beginner cannot expect to turn out as good a job as the experience polishers do but he can learn,
and learning, as far as gun polishing and buffing is concerned, consists mainly of practice.
PRACTICING ON STEEL STOCK.
If you do have an old gun, the beginner can practice on a steel bar. The bar is a piece of flat cold rolled
steel about 4" long, 2" wide and 1" thick and using various sizes and grits of dressed canvas wheels to
grind the pieces. After they are ground to the satisfaction of the individual doing the job, the pieces
should then be buffed, cleaned, and reblued. The same sort of exercise can be carried out on round,
square, and octagon-shaped pieces until the beginner has gotten the feel of the wheels, so to speak.
When the gunsmith knows how each type canvas, felt, cloth, etc. of wheel will cut when dressed with any
of the various abrasives, in different grades. He has pretty well mastered the basics of grinding or
polishing, if you are using the very fine compounds with so-called dressed wheel.
CORRECT GRIT
Using too coarse a wheel to grind pits from a surface is poor practice because deep scratches are
made which must in turn be obliterated by successively using finer grit wheels. On the other hand, using
too fine a wheel makes for a slow job in which the metal gets very hot and breaks down the glue, which