I always wondered how Paul Revere and the silversmiths of his day got shiny, incredibly smooth flat items like plates, trays, silverware items since they are typically portrayed as dinging away with their tiny hammers…
Did they actually polish them flat from a dimpled finish, thereby wearing off a significant amount of valuable silver?
Often by using dapping blocks or swage block and then lapping for the polishing portion
Here is one shaped to make spoons and small pans. They are and were in use by black and white smiths. They were commercially produced as a tool just like buying a router or a tablesaw.
Dapping is really just using a material softer than the abrasive as a carrier here you can see them being used to polish a very tiny screw.
Really a modern diamond saw or a drill is just lapped with diamond powder but it works under a similar premise.
One of the images in the article you’re linking to shows sucha polishing tool
Some of the tiny hammers are specifically for getting them smooth - a process called planishing.
Like this: video
Think of all the grand stone carvings from Mesoamerica … them folks didn’t even have metal tools, just harder stones …
I need new glasses. I first read this as a thread about a Polish rock metal band.
See post #12
My father was stationed in the pacific during WW2. He made a few bucks removing scratches from fellow soldiers watch crystals with grit or polish, spit and his thumb & side of his index finger.
He’d spend a some off duty hours polishing and doing whatever other chores needed doing. His dad sent him the abrasives, they both were surprised that this skill was uncommon. Had to have some dandy callouses after a while.
But it doesn’t go round, does it? (My post was in response to t-bonham@scc.net’s post about a revolving polishing stone - ignore this if I’ve misunderstood your meaning).
When I think of Polish Metal Rock, the bands that first to come to my mind are:
Behemoth
Vader
Acid Drinkers
When he wrote :
I assumed that by “horizontal” he meant flat, not revolving, polishing stones.
