I found this old rusty wrench from a flea market. I tought I should try to restore and polish it. The wrench was very disty and barely funtional because the adjustment mechanism was almost jammed by rust and dirt.

As a fan on Mad Max movies I would have wanted to keep it the way it was, but because I wanted to be able to use it, I decided to learn how to polish tools. how ever I still wanted to keep all the dents and scratches on the wrench as a sign of the tools age. Otherwise I could have sanded the flat sides of the tool to perfect mirror finish.

Step 1: Tools

This project can be done completetly with only basic tools. I used a power drill which could be replaced with some good old hard work.

The tools I used for the project were:

Screwdriver

Sandpaper (grits 200, 400, 800, 1500, 2000)

Power drill

wire brush (for power drill)

polishing (buffing) wheel

polishing compound

Step 2: Disassembly

I had to disasseble the wrench in order to clean the mechanism up. This also allowed my to do al little more detailed work with the polishing because there was less thight spots where the steel it would be hard to polish from. I used a vise to hold the wrench while I opened the screw keepeng the mechanism together. The screw was stuck and it was really hard to open it. I could not have done it without the vise by only holding the wrench by hand because the screwdriver was slipped so easily. The vise held the wrench still while I pressed the screwdriver down really hard while turning which kept the screwdriver from slippind and destroying the screw.

After the screw is off the wheel should come right off. Also the lower jaw of the wrech should come off by pulling. In my case it was a little stuck and I had to move is up and down for a moment until it loosened enough for me to pull it off.

I'd imagine it's hard or impossible to find spare parts to something like this. So, be careful with old stuck screws if you want to keep using them.

Step 3: Sanding

I started the cleaning on the parts with a wire brush attached to a power drill. This cleaned off most of the rust, dirt and old paint. This would propably have been fine if didn't care how the tool looks. The steel was far from shiny.

I started sanding with 200 grit sand paper to clean the surface a little more from the small gaps and other areas the wire brush did not clean up so well. When sanding/polishing you usually want to double the grit number of the paper you are using. I sanded pretty much everything exept the threads of the screw. I wanted to clean every little detail I didn't want dirt and rust for example in the hole around the wheel just because I was lazy.

Therefore next I started the polishing process with a 400 grit sandpaper . When polishing surfaces you usually want to sand only in one direction with every roughness of paper you are using. This causes lines on the surfece you are sanding. Then when you switch to higher grit you change the angle of the direction you are sanding in which allows you to see when all the lines caused by the lower grit paper has disappeared. Then you know that you can move to higher grit. In this case I did not use that method because the shape of the tool did not allow me to change the direction (of sanding) a lot. In addition the surface was not so smooth that a few small scathes in the finished surface would make any difference.

After 400 grits, I moved to 800 grits. Then I moved to 1500 and ended with 2000 because these were the paper I happened to have already. It's important to remember that as you sand the paper will get stuff stuck to it and the paper will become smoother. In reality when I finished with the 2000 grit paper the result was already a lot smoother what it would have been if I had changed the paper more often. I guess the finish at this point it was somewhere between 2000 and 3000 grits.

While sanding it's also important to remember that you are constantly removing material from the surface. If you remove a lot of matrial the parts will be moore loose. For exmaple, I did not sand the hidden part screw any more than I had to in order to clean it up, because I did not want the parts to have too much room to wiggle after I attached them back togerther.

Step 4: Polishing

After the sanding I desided to finish the polishing of the parts with a polishing compound. I used a polishing wheel for the power drill and a 2 part polishing compound set. First I took the red compound which was kind of pre-finish compound. I pressed the bar of compond againt the wheel to get a the compond on the wheel and the I started rubbing the parts I wanted to polish with the wheel. I added more compound a coulpe of times.

After the red coumpound I used the white compund which is meant to used for finishing the polish. When changing from one compond to another you should change also the polishing wheel. I didn't because I did not have one. I'm really happy with the results even thought I didn't change the wheel. It was hard to capture it on video or photos but the polishing compound really made a difference to the end result.

Now all is that is left is to assemble the wrech which was a piece of case becasue the parts were now cleaned and I had no trouble fitting them back together. Adding some oil to the moving parts is also highly racommended.