Great video. Love this experimental approach.

Awesome brother!

Hi Dean, all well said and we are happy to come along while you get this process refined and these processes of finishes honed in on. Thank you for the share. that was a fun experiment on those brass blanks, we think you are doing great here. Lance & Patrick.

Dean, I have a small machine made for doing this. It uses rubber pencil erasers for the rubber tips. These come in long cylinders which can be cut to convenient lengths. The metal is first polished to avoid trying to do the perlage over scratches. Actual diamond dust in oil is used with the rubber erasers. The rubber is not impregnated like a craytex rod. Another method that I have been experimenting with is using small "dots" punched from 3" diameter PSA micro abrasive discs. These are stuck on the end of a chucked wooden dowel and used with oil.

Awesome stuff mate. Great seeing you learn and progress.

Nice; I can identify with the mind set of wanting to make every action the best you've ever done, and then the next one, and so on :)

Well done. This was helpful.

Well done, good try, thanks for sharing!

Looks very nice Dean.

Looks really good, great video! 😀👍

Very Nice job... I will be following your lead!

Amazing reference, thank you so much

Since the abrasive is impregnated into the rubber, maybe you can have constant air flowing over the piece (maybe from an air compressor) so that way it can keep the brass dust off the piece. That may account for the extra undesirable abrasion you were getting. Also possibly attaching a guide to your jig would allow the drill press to only go down a certain amount. That way it gives you a repeatable hard stop with each pass. I don’t know how you would do it, or if you even can, maybe a long rod attached to the jig that can hit a non spinning part of the press, but it’s just something I thought of. Those patterns are so cool looking! There was one where you mixed the big and small diameters, and that gave a unique look I’ve never seen on a watch before. This is now my second most watched channel on KZfaq. I have to watch each video now! Great stuff as always.

Very well done! Maybe the metal powder can alter the results, you could try to blow out the metal powder between steps.

yo this was a really great video man!… i bet you’ll make great things in the future

hi, I am a jeweler, and when I was making my final set, in collage nun of my professors even knew what I was talking abought. however, I finally was able to figure out how to do it with a wooden dowl and some 600 wet&dry Dubbel sided taped to the end and simply spun in my normal 10" drill press. I also found the bust eye-watering holographic look, was when I only made an overlap of 50%.

I like the setup with the pin and the brass "collar" i suggest trying different diameters of the polisher, and different patterns as well.. like going outwards from the center.. I made a "dedicated dril press " for a Proxxon motor with a Proxxon cross-slide, and that suits me well..

looks nice, good job! and that's just your first try, I wonder what you'll come up with after some more practice. Good luck! thanks for making these videos!

great job!

I don’t know how fast your lathe spins but you could use that and make a jig for the tail stock.

I think it would it be cool if you polished same rate whether you're doing the outside or the inside, causing the ones near the center to be more tightly packed I think that would give a pretty cool looking illusion that you're looking down a tunnel

Well done and thanks for sharing. What do you use for satin finish on stainless steel cases? Thanks

If you use Sharpie or Daikin on the piece to begin with it helps with your layout and we'll give you a nice contrast as you work

Great journey.Lange & Sohne use pedal instead of lever .

Thank you for your video very helpful, beside the tips for the finish what type of holder you are using to hold it in place I’m talking about the one that attach to your drill . Thank you

Hi Dean, very interesting, you may be refering to what is known as the feel. How it feels when you use it, now your bench drill only has a certain amount of feel and you may get a better finish with a sensitive drilling attachement. I wonder if it would help you if you had a horizontal division plate to consistently turn the wheel - disk a set amount around the circomference of the wheel - disk. Your perlage looks good for a first attempt and will certainly get better the more you use the method, hope this makes sense, please excuse any typing errors :-)

Try these: 1.Lower mill speed to minimum; rub wax on the workpiece; apply linear, not circular. And make another video again if you get better results :)

Great videos. Are these 1mm pin polishers? Which pin polisher grit did you end up liking the most? Thank you for making these videos.

Another fine video. Some sort of rotary table to control the indexing and hot lapidary wax, superglue or even loctite to secure the work pice to to hold it better and control. Keep it up

You could try finer abrasives. Finer scratches make it almost into a hologram type effect. It's like giving the surface some depth. Quite spellbinding to look at.

It's aces mate

Great video yet again. Can you give us an show and tell about your lathes please, as I notice you have at least three; Cowell, Myford and Hercus? How and why you use them. :)

a straight line pattern might be a better way to get results? finishing parts is something that takes a life time to master.

👍

Great job! Perhaps a light smear of silicone grease could tone things down a bit?

At 4:10 you talk about pumice paste. Google "Clover lapping compound". It comes in many grits. It is also pretty expensive and messy but worth exploring. Even toothpaste is a very fine grit and that will only cost you a walk down the hall to the bathroom. You can buy 3oz tubes of valve grinding and lapping compound online for about $5 and that should be more than enough for an experiment with different grits and much cheaper to experiment with than Clover.

Could you not do it in the lathe with an indexing attachment? And you could set your depth/pressure exact that way?

If you need information for different finishing you are welcome if you have questions. (If you look on Instagram "Ketelaars Watches" you can see some examples of finishes I applied)

I think I prefer the concentric pattern over a spiral; it looks like the Spirit of Saint Louis!

So what color did you go for and what diameter?

i don‘t think it matters if you push hard or soft on the result, but if you use the same pressure everywhere or rather, how far you drill into the object. If you drill the same distance with all points, you will get a perfect result. Those points that are drilled especially deep will show as circles, as the next drill doesn‘t touch the materiel in the deeper circle, right?

What grit did you use

Well done Dean 👍

Can you tell me what bits you're using for this?

Hey Dean, thanks for the great videos. I really enjoy your videos because the only other source for this information are dusty old books, written in old english that no one understands. Are you using any specific type of brass? I know they have various compositions and I didn't know if you chose a specific variation for certain characteristics. Where do you source the brass from? Thanks again.

Am I right in saying perlage is also used to capture the small particles of metal and keep them away from the movement?

I laughed a little too hard at the uncle comment🤣

Check out Memoria Tecnica based in Seattle.

What year are you in with the BHI? I’m writing my Unit D1 Theoretical test tommorow, any tips?

Dang it looks surpsingly sexy. Where do you get these circular blocks of brass? I really wanna give this a try (I don't own any of the tools you have though so i'm gonna do it super hardcore manually with a pen or something with sandpaper wrapped round the end).

what is the thickness of the brass pin ?

did u or did u not make the sping ur self ?

I hope the next episode is you doing geneva striping 😊.. I've been experimenting a bit but without great success

You can fix anything with tape, and if you cant you are not using enough tape!

Neat tool but doesn't this need to be done in an indexer? The slightest difference in centers I think shows in the reflections