Got my fresh build 1911 kitted up. Just cosmetic stuff now, mostly with the grip safety.
Swapped out the wrong sized sight on the Hudson too.
To avoid marring the finish on the Hudson I used an aluminium (sic) punch or drift. You get maybe two uses with it, then the tip is all munged up. And it leaves aluminum marks on stuff that looks AWFUL, but it doesn't scratch the finish so much.
So I asked a man of experience how to get the ugly silvery marks off my nearly new gun.
"Oil and a Q-Tip"
Hey! That works.
Now, the aluminum punch. You CAN refurbish that, easily enough. A few times. Use a sander. Do NOT ever touch aluminum (no sic) to a grinding wheel. The metal will fill the pores of the stone unevenly, taking the wheel out of balance. The next time someone uses it it will wobble and maybe fracture apart. Danger danger.
Disk or belt sander. Please.
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Hmm, I've seen a few grinding wheels with a serious layer of aluminum on them. Never noticed any imbalance problem. I suspect the reason is that once you get beyond the grit surface it gets harder to transfer aluminum. It's light enough that what can be packed into the surface pores isn't enough mass to cause a failure. The wheels have fairly low speed ratings, which is a factor. Hang a giant wheel on a grinder intended for small wheels (higher rpm's), and you might be able to engineer that failure.
Aluminium dust, now, that can be problematic. Great firestarter, and bad to breathe. I think those are the reasons to avoid grinding aluminum.
IF you need to grind aluminum, hit the stone with a candle or a bit of beeswax first....then the aluminum doesn't stick.
YMMV
As a speaker of REAL English, I can't understand the American desire to spell aluminium incorrectly.
I was going to say that there are no other elements named that way - that is ending in -um but not -ium, but then I checked.
I found lanthanum, tantalum, and molybdenum - maybe they were the ones named by Americans.
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