Keg polishing

I'm trying to polish my corny kegs to make them look as good as possible. I've read several threads on here about keg polishing. I don't know if anyone else tried this method, but I just want to report that a six inch spiral-sewn buffing wheel intended for a bench grinder mounted to a drill with a drill arbor doesn't seem to go fast enough to do much good.

I tried a corded and a cordless drill, but neither spins particularly fast. I tried using Ryobi emory compound that comes in a push-up tube. It's fairly hard stuff. The wheel has a hard time picking up much of the compound with the slow spinning limit of the drill. Then when applied to the keg, it hardly makes a noticeable difference.

Bench grinders spin much faster than my drills and would probably do a much better job. But holding a keg up against a bench grinder-mounted wheel doesn't seem like an easy task, and I don't have a bench grinder anyhow, so I'm off to the store to see if there are any hand-held tools that can do the job. I might end up trying to use my angle grinder if I can find some kind of polishing wheel for it.

try a smaller buff pad on a die grinder. they spin at 20,000rpm.

Good thought. I have a pneumatic die grinder, and it seems to work pretty good, but my little pancake nail gun air compressor is the limiting factor with it. It can power the die grinder for all of 10 seconds at a time. I'm going to drag out my big compressor and see how that does.

If you spend the $$To get a good bench mounted buffer (Grinder) you'll find yourself polishing every damn thing you own, and will never be sorry you got it....especially if you mount it low enough that you can hold the cornie on your knees while you it in front of it.

P.S. 20,000RPM is kinda dangerous for a buffing wheel.

BigKahuna said:

P.S. 20,000RPM is kinda dangerous for a buffing wheel.

Click to expand...

Thats true I didn't think of that since I have regulators on my air tools just to adjust speed. Good catch.

I'd never try using a drill because even if it worked, it would take forever. I mean, my sanke job took like 4 hours total and that was with a 4.5" angle grinder and the gatorgrit polishing pads running at 10,000 rpm.

The polishing wheel on the die grinder worked alright once I hooked up my big compressor. But it was hard to control the speed and too easy to make it go too fast. The one keg I polished came out looking pretty good all things considered, but these are rough looking old kegs, and I really need to gently grind out some of the deeper scratches and scuffs before polishing.

Polishing is a slow process even with power tools. I've decided I'm not going to go to this much work for the other eleven kegs. I'll settle for dull looking but clean kegs.

If I decide to revisit this down the road, I'm going to go down to Lowe's and pick up some of those gatorgrit pads for my angle grinder like Bobby used. I think it'll make the job go faster and will also help me get some of the scratches and nicks out more easily.

Bench grinder is on my wish list though.

a buffing wheel on a cheap grinder from harbor freight if you have one in your town and some polishing compound. or you can buy a polishers form autozone or walmart.

just a plain green scrubby and water will brighten them up considerably without a lot of work. I do it to all my "new" cornies. It does a good job on those oxidized black marks too with a little elbow grease.

...Nevermind me, really old thread...Carry on.