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Polishing on a vertical CNC milling machine?

Anyone have any experience or suggestions? I have several old CNC machines that are no longer used in machining, but I was thinking if I could use them to polish surfaces that we currently done manually.

John Mann
Manufacturing Engineer - Newport, NH, USA
January 5, 2009

It would be too simplistic to think that if you can hold the polishing tool and achieve the speed you may do the job. Successful polishing very much depends on having an accurate control of the exerted pressure, amount of abrasive and monitoring of visual aspect. Almost all polishing tools are non-rigid. A conventional CNC machine only controls position. It does not "see" and does not "feel". With non-rigid abrasives the machine is totally lost. Another point, most of the time their waybeds are not protected against abrasives. But if you can overcome these problems give it a try.
G. Marrufo-Mexico

Guillermo Marrufo
Monterrey, NL, Mexico
January 7, 2009

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