Hi,

I am looking for a more efficient way to polish my silver jewellery. Generally the pieces I make are small pendants roughly 15-25mm, at the moment I use a cheap rotary tool with various mops and luxi compounds. When I spoke to someone at RioGrande about luxi compounds they said rotary tools are no good using these compounds as they need to be 3,000 RPM and rotary tools are too slow for this.

My rotary tool says it is 8,000 - 18,000 RPM, so I am slightly confused as to why it would be too slow?

My main problem is cleaning the piece after polishing. As my pieces are so small I use double sided sticky tape to fix it to a small rigid board and then polish on this - but when I polish it obviously heats the piece which melts the tape glue and leaves a very big gluey mess. I tried using rubbing alcohol/surgical spirit to remove this…….. big mistake! It stinks! Do you have any tips or tricks as how to polish tiny pieces?

I was considering a bench polisher, but i'm thinking this would be worse for small pieces?

I also have problems cleaning off the polishing compound residue after polishing, I am using an Ultra 4000 ultrasonic with hot water from the kettle, but I find it still needs a little wiping after this. I then use a micro fibre cloth to clean off the remaining residue but this then leaves fine scratches in my piece?

Thanks for your help
Hannah