Polishing Hardened Steel

The process of hardening steel using heat treatments, annealing and quenching can produce scale and blackening on the surface. In addition to cleaning and polishing the surface, steel parts often also need to be deburred.

The picture above shows a two step process to clean and deburr the part followed by a polishing step to smooth-out the surface and produce a pleasing surface finish. The part on the left is the unfinished, hardened stainless steel part.

Step 1 (middle part) required a vibratory tumbling with a general purpose Ceramic Angle Cut Cylinder to remove the 'burn' marks on the surface and to deburr and round the edges. The result was a matte, tumbled surface finish.

The second step (far right) was designed to further clean the surface and result in a smoother part. A polishing Precision Ceramic Sphere was perfect for this part since all the features of the part (i.e., no inside corners) were conducive to a round media.