Post by aDave on Apr 3, 2018 14:07:27 GMT -5
I've been doing this since November so still am a newbie myself. At first I did the same. Worried I was doing it right or wrong. You guys give us newbies something to strive for and posts like this (blunt or not) are so very helpful. Why only 1 week in medium?
Hi Allison. This place is a great resource for newbs, and when I found myself getting back into the hobby after a LONG hiatus, I was in here religiously looking to get information. When I first started about 20 years ago, I was a "one week for all stages" type of guy, as that's what was written in the instructions. Surprisingly, I was able to get decent results, but nothing like I'm seeing now, simply because of all the help I've gotten here.
When I returned to the hobby, I asked lots of questions...maybe even too many. As such I found myself getting lost in detail and was struck with "paralysis from analysis." I finally got out of that rut, and just started rolling things and seeing what worked for me. That's why I simply recommended above to just roll the stuff and see what happens. From there, that's where all of the tweaking occurs. Glad you find stuff like that helpful, as that's all I meant to do...as straight to the point as it was.
As to why I only do one week in medium (120/220 SiC)? I don't know if I have a good answer for you other than it seems to work for me. Or, better said, I haven't been noticeably hampered by doing only one week in that stage. I haven't found the need yet to test longer times at that stage, but perhaps I will one day.
Along related lines, my "fine" stage (500 AO) also used to be one week as well. I chose to extend that stage to 2 weeks (while not recharging grit) hoping that the 500 would break down enough to serve as a pre-polish. It seems to work, but I've not compared it to actually using 1000 AO in a pre-polish stage for one week before starting my polish stage. I may have to try that one day...we'll see.
ETA: Hmmm...don't know why the quote is so messed up. I can't even edit out the tags to fix it. I'll try to fix it later.