Re: ATM and ball-milled rouge

[Bill & Tracy Marriott <btk@pacbell.net>]

Roger C. Ceragioli wrote:
> 
> Dear All,
> 

> 
> On the other hand, my experience with ball-milled rouge was a disaster.  The  rouge 
>slurry evolved gas as it was being rotated in its 
jar, so that after a
> week of rotating I could not budge the jar's lid and had to pierce it to
> open the jar.  The jar was full of foam under pressure which then shot out
> despite all my efforts to contain it and sprayed the wall of my kitchen!
> Fortunately, I don't have a wife and so live to tell the tale.
> 
> Despite that I recovered as much rouge as I could from the jar and
> elutriated it repeatedly to cleanse it and remove any large particles left
> over.  The rouge I recovered was incredibly fine, but smelled strongly of
> rust (the steel balls were worn slightly away by polishing with the rouge in
> the jar).  I tried the rouge and although it worked very smoothly, after
> maybe three wets a huge scratch was made on my mirror.  This scratch was so
> big that I could clearly see it in the Foucault test.  There were also a
> number of smaller scratches and some sleeks, all apparently from the
> ball-milled rouge.
> 
> Fortunately, the polishing pads seem to work fast so that I can regrind and
> polish the scratched mirror pretty quickly.  But I think I'll stick to
> unmilled rouge from now on.
> 
> Roger Ceragioli

Roger:

Last year I made a batch of ball milled barnsite and a batch of ball 
milled rouge (discussions are in the archive). Both produced wonderful 
surfaces, TILL, I got down to less than half the volume, started getting 
scratches.  Filtered again, still scratches.

This was with chromed 5/16 ball bearings.

Close examination showed lots of wear on the balls.

As per discussions recently, I purchased from McMaster Carr some
 316 stainless 1/2" balls, milled Universal's red rouge for 
48 hours, no gas, no scratches on a wonderful 8f4.2 I just finished
We'll see what happens as I get further into the batch...

Take care
-- 
Bill Marriott
Woodacre, Ca. USA
btk@pacbell.net

http://www.starlightoptical.com
Optical/ATM projects

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