Sigh. Polishing compounds really like to stick to silver and leave drag marks. Even if you remove the dragged on compound in the sonic You will often find unpolished haze marks where the compound was.
When polishing silver if I want a perfect finish without compound drag lines I do what I call a “Wet Buffing.” I use Wrights silver polish, Twinkle, or Herman’s silver polish. After using tripoli I throughly clean the piece in my sonic and dry it with cotton only. No paper towels, no finger rubbing, no Kleenex even. Then I mount an unstitched flannel buff and apply a very small amount of rouge. Now here comes the messy part. I make a thin-ish slurry of silver polish and coat the piece. While it’s all wet and drippy with a coating of polish paste on it I then buff on the wheel while I repeatedly add more moisture to the piece. In the old days Kerosene was used as a polishing lubricant. The smell was awful. Though a watery soapy solution works I find the silver polish does a better job. It’s messy but then jewelry making is a messy business anyway. After rinsing be sure to only use cotton to dry.
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