After wetsanding the belt, and getting it pretty smooth, it was time to give it a final polishing. I use some pretty expensive and hard to find tools for this step:
Toothpaste and a sock.
Yup, regular old toothpaste. None of that fancy, new fangled whitening stuff either. Just your off the shelf, white Colgate. Sock provided by Target.
The methodology is similar to wetsanding. Add some water, add some toothpaste, and polish with the sock. Repeat until happy.
Along the way, the polished surface will no doubt reveal flaws that you didn't see before. You just need to decide exactly how "perfect" you want the surface to be. Since this is going to be cast in urethene and probably painted, I didn't feel the need to go TOO crazy.
Here's one of the straps after I've polished it. Probably not too easy to see how good it looks from this photo, but trust me, it's lookin' pretty good.
And here's the buckle. You can see there are a lot of burn-throughs in the paint, but I don't care. It's level, and it's polished, so when it gets molded, none of those will be visible.
And that's it! The belt is now ready to be molded. I'm thinking one session in the garage should be enough to get that finished, as it's a very straightforward dump mold. I'll be sure to blog that when it's done, so you won't miss a thing.
In other news, the weather has finally cleared up around here. Now, don't get me wrong. When I say "Cleared up", what that means is that our light rain and some clouds went away. Here in Southern California, we tend to miss all of the truly harsh weather. In exchange, we get things like earthquakes, brush fires, mud slides, OJ, you know. But it all pans out. Today, I could see snow on Saddleback Mountain from my balcony! Very nice!!
Catch you next time!
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