Gloves and rotary equipment are a recipe for lost fingers and
severe hand damage. Do not ever wear gloves while using polishing
motors, drill presses, lathes etc. If you want the protection then
cut the fingers off the glove and where only the fingers but even
that can be problematic if it grabs the glove finger tip and it
doesn't come off cleanly. It is just not safe.
I’ll second that thought. The single worst accident in the jewelry
industry I ever actually saw was a guy, new to polishing, who was
wearing light cotten (photo type) gloves while polishing a bangle
bracelet. The bracelet caught on the buff, and the glove caught
between the bracelet and the buff went with it. The kids entire first
finger stayed in the glove. surgeons weren’t able to reattach it. Too
badly mangled when ripped from his hand. Granted, he was doing
everything wrong, polishing this bangle with a buff small enough to
pull inside the bangle, just barely, plus he was buffing across the
wire, not in it’s direction, AND he had that finger hooked through
the bracelet, rather than holding it in a pinch grip. But it seemed
certain to the doctors and others nearby that he might not have lost
the finger had the glove not been there too. Who knows. But they make
it harder to fully control where everything is and how it’s held.
Dealing with the heat of polishing is the least important of the
issues. Safety, and remember that the surface of a modest sized buff
can be moving at 60 miles an hour without too much trouble, plus the
inertia of a powerful motor behind that speed, and it’s more
important to protect your hands from all that energy than the heat of
buffing. Once you’ve addressed those issues, and know you’re safe
with them, then worry about the heat. Finger cots, extending not past
the first knuckle, will pull off easily enough if caught that they
are safe. Buy them or cut the finger tips off gloves to make them.
Other useful methods:
For smaller flat shapes, especially if you’re doing many of the same
item, benefit from a polishing jig or nest. Take one piece, and heat
it hot enough to let it burn it’s way slightly into a block of wood.
That depression will now nicely house the pieces while that hard to
hold surface is buffed. Small things like pendants or things with
jump rings or the like can be have one end of an unfolded paper clip
(bend to an S shape hook) put through the hole to hang onto it, while
you hold the other end of the paper clip and support the work,
pressing it to the buff with a small bit of heavy leather or wood, or
the like. Strips of leather can be wrapped around the outside of a
finger ring to provide insulation while you polish the inside finger
hole of a ring. That operation heats up a ring fast, so the
insulation helps a lot. Plus, if the ring jams on the finger shaped
buff, as they sometimes do, the suddenly spinning ring will be
hitting the leather while you pull your hand away in surprise, not
milling its way through your finger tip. For a lot of general
polishing, though, just be prepared to take a break for a moment when
the work starts to get uncofortably hot. Most likely, your dust
collector will have a screen over it’s intake to keep things from
being sucked into the dust collector. Resting the hot work for a
moment or two on that screen, puts it into a fairly strong air flow,
which will quickly cool it again, ready for more buffing. Or work on
more than one item at a time, and switch back and forth as they heat
up.
You may also find that different buffs, and different buffing
compounds, differ in the degree to which they heat up the work. Some
compounds seem to work with less friction for a given amount of
cutting. I happen to prefer and use the somewhat aggressive platinum
polishing compounds for most of my buffing work, in part for this
reason. Based on aluminum oxide abrasive, finely graded, these
compounds cut faster than tripoli, and seem to heat up less. They
also offer the advantage of solving the problem of solder seams in
some types of metals (white gold in particular) seeming to polish out
leaving lines. The buffing compounds are aggressive enough that
differences in hardness in the metal seem to cause few problems.
However, for the same reason, they may not be appropriate when
buffing things with softer stones (facet edges on softer stones can
get rounded over). And another product you may wish to try are the 3m
radial bristle brushes. No compound needed, it’s built in to the
brush. Graded abrasives, so the coarser grades can be quite
aggressive, evem more so that bobbing compound, while the finest
grades can almost replace rouge. Less messy to use, and the open
bristled brush structure creates a strong airflow along the surface
of the work so it really doesn’t heat up much. Try them. You might
like them.
Hope that helps.
Peter