Cleaning and Polishing Carbon Steel

These carbon steel parts had a blue coating on them that needed to be removed prior to polishing. Abrasive blasting was not an option as it could pit the metal and make it impossible to get a near mirror finish. Instead, a tumbling process was first used to remove the coating and then polish the part.

To remove the coating on this moderately complex geometry, the part was tumbled with Ceramic Media in a wet process. The abrasiveness of the media removed the coating over the course of a few hours and left the part with a matte, tumbled finish.

A second, dry tumbling step was used to polish the part. In this case, the Pegco™ GBW-3.9 Fine Premium Treated Tumbling Media was the ideal choice to get into the slots around the outside diameter of the part and not get stuck in the internal areas. Dry tumbling is often a longer cycle time and took about 12 hours to achieve the polish seen in the picture.