It's a safety thing to stop machine operatives from sewing their hands together!

If only you'd told him that *before* he switched it on, and sewed his hands together ...

🤕

I do NOT want to be involved in a recall/refund program!

Haha I can totally understand that 😉

I did not realize this was a demo of a 'prototype' 🙂 Great stuff none the less!

**UPDATE** I forgot to mention that this is a prototype machine and not for sale yet, it’s in the testing phase at the moment. 

I installed the steel shaft by taking out the two grub screws from the shaft and pushed it in through the housing on the front of the box. Next, I had to line up the screw holes where the key channel is on the motor. Once I got it all the way on with a little gentle persuasion with a rubber mallet, I reinstalled the two grub screws, tightened them up along with two more on the housing bearing bracket. See pics. On the bottom of the machine there is an access hole to get the grub screws in/out. 

Installing the steel shaft. I couldn’t video this bit, I don’t have a head cam. 🤣 

This video is after the fact but with an explanation of what I did. 

It is highly advisable to anchor the machine to something solid, such as a sturdy work bench. There are a couple of options to do this, clamp it down or screw it down, access points have been made available for this to be done and screw holes with countersinks have already been done too. I decided to screw it down and clamp it, just because I could. 😁 

Anchoring the machine to the corner of my work bench with screws and clamps. 

Commission testing the machine before using. I plugged it in, turned it on and it worked. I played around with the speed with no problems, it works straight out of the box. 

As you would imaging, when the lever is at the bottom, it is off, there is no rotation. As you raise the lever, the rotational speed increases. When the lever is all the way to the top, it’s on max speed. 

I stalling the buffing wheels/mops. There is a steel rod that goes into a hole in the steel shaft, this is to hold everything whilst you put one of the buffing heads/mops on and use washers, spacers and a big 30mm nut to keep it all on there. 

I painted a metal water bottle in metal flake and candy paints a few weeks ago and had flattened the paint by sanding through the grades to P3000 grade, it just needed buffing up to a high sheen. So I used it for the first test run for this machine test. I used the green compound and the harder mop head for the initial compounding buff. 
I realise this isn’t a guitar, I just wanted to see how this compound acted when buffing this kind of paint, I think it works well. The main advantage is that everything stays dry, no water is needed. My initial anxiety was that the clear coat may get too hot and burn/melt. Water is normally used with polishing this paint to keep the surface cool whilst the buffer polished up the surface. This initial test went well and I’m confident it will work with everything. 

1st compound test. 

2nd compound test. I changed the buffing mop over to the softer one and changed the compound for the finer one. It’s come up very shiny indeed. 

One thing I’ve noticed about changing the buffing mops is it’s a bit tricky to hold the steel shaft with one hand and try not to drop the mop on the floor as you are spinning it to take it off. You will notice that I am trying to stop this from happening as you watch this next video. If there was a spindle lock somewhere on box (it may need a safety switch on it so the power doesn’t come on if you forget to switch it off again before setting it spinning again), it would free up both hands for removing and installing the mop heads. The last thing that could happen is to drop a mop head on the floor, they need to be kept as clean as possible and kept in their own respective plastic bags when not in use. 

Shiny shiny! ✨✨✨✨✨✨ 

I ran out of sunlight today to show off this shine properly, maybe tomorrow. ☀️

Tomorrow I will buff a guitar, maybe the chameleon bass ✨✨✨✨✨✨before the Sun King. ✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨

Shiny, shiny!

what might be good ... when you do the other stuff tomorrow, could you take some “before” pics, and show them next to the “after” pics, hopefully in lighting conditions that are consistent-ish.

Would that be possible?

I’m thinking that it would then show the effect of the buffer-er?

what might be good ... when you do the other stuff tomorrow, could you take some “before” pics, and show them next to the “after” pics, hopefully in lighting conditions that are consistent-ish.

@tv101 Yeah, I guess I forgot to take pictures of what it was like before. I’ve just found a video of when I first sanded it (I’ve taken some screen shots), it’s got a satin type sheen. Can you see the difference? 

I will definitely be doing a before and after with the guitars tomorrow, that was always going to be the way I did it. Today was just a test. 👍 

Before and after, satin and gloss. 👍 

If there was a spindle lock somewhere on box

Top work Boo!

The shaft lock is a tricky one, not impossible, but very far from simple and the opposite of cheap! As soon as I start trying to customise standard parts or introduce secondary systems everything starts to get expensive. I just inserted the 8mm rod though the hole in the shaft, so that I could stop it spinning with one hand, and then spun the mop until it was nearly off and then held on to it with the other hand so it didn’t fall on the floor. The mop heads do bind slightly on the shaft but this is preferable to them being lose and creating an imbalance on the shaft.

Looking forward to seeing your next instalment in the sunshine!

Cheers

Darren

Looks like a good test run

Nice work @boo, so far I like The Chuffer!

Going by the other occasional sounds I could hear, it didn't seem you turned the volume down notably. Is it as quiet as it seems?