During a trip to his local welding store, Kevin picks up some specialty grinding pads, also known as grinding wheels. He invites you along as he gives them a whirl …. The first one is an EZ Strip, which looks a little like a Brillo pad. He puts it onto his angle grinder and grinds a section of 4″ box tubing. “That’s amazing,” he says. The grinding pad removes all the scale without leaving grrr marks, sander marks or dig marks, and he didn’t have to push hard, either. He then shows a 10-foot section of 4″ box tubing for a sculpture he is creating. It took two regular soft pad grinding discs and a couple of hours of work with his 7″ angle grinder to clean the scale from it, while the EZ Strip cleaned off the scale the same metal in seconds. The next disc he tries out is a medium fine OA (AO). Kevin cleans a small area that still has scale on it and then spends a minute or two grinding the area where he had already removed the scale. This is clearly a polishing wheel, and it does a fine job, especially where he’d already removed the scale. (In the other area, it just seemed to polish the scale.) He speculates that if he came back with 80-grit, 100-grit, 180-grit and 220-grit grinding discs first, then used this polishing pad, he could achieve a really nice finish – possibly even a mirror finish – with it. The next pad Kevin introduces is a Z-Thru, or see-through, wheel, because you can see really the metal you’re working on while you’re grinding because of the shape of the pad. The last grinding wheel he shows is a 3C ceramic, which is contaminant free. If you’re working on aluminum or stainless steel, this disc won’t leave contamination you’d have to otherwise clean up before TIG welding. Kevin looks forward to working more with each disc and doing more comprehensive videos on them later.
