Oh Good, glad it arrived safe Skip.
Purpleheart can be a pain. Purpleheart may be the most variable wood I have ever worked. Some is easy to work and some just about impossible.
Sometimes it wants to scorch and burn at the drop of a hat! This particular piece was like that.
I am wondering if where the wood came from in the tree is what matters? Near the butt its compressed and grain reversals and tough as a cob? Higher up much more manageable?
Or.........Maybe its just different trees and some are fairly mild and some seriously gnarly.
The steel is ground and polished. You can do it to any kind of metal.
Its not instant gratification though.
First the steel is ground with grinders to shape it and remove surface imperfections. You are sculpting metal here. Everything shows. So you better take it slow and keep checking from all angles.
And then when you get the shape you want, sanded through the grits (several).
I use flap wheels, a narrow belt grinder, hard sanding disks, soft rubber disks covered with sandpaper and sanding mops which are narrow strips of sandpaper loosely tied together to follow irregular lines.
Finally, 2 different cloth polishing wheel setups. The first is sewed tight cotton with coarse cutting compound run fast (3600), and the second a med sewed wheel with a cut 'n color compound run slow (1000rpm more or less) .
The cut n color is a very light finish cut followed by high polish.
I was lucky and scored 2 bars of the cut n color polish recently. I was just about out of polish and had to go shopping. Everything I was finding was either jokingly tiny (measured in ounces) or out beyond my budget. Bricks had gone way up.
I finally found some crusty crunchy old old stock, for cheap, and talked myself into taking a chance. The bars were big (4 pounds) so I went for it.
Turns out, just below the oxidized surface the polish is outright superb!! Better than what I was using last month!
So yay
yours Scott
