Tid-Bit 11 - Making a Burnisher
Burnisher 101
How to make your own
Thinking about burnishers brings to mind one of my first MART’s. Never had I imagined there would be so many specialized tools for working on clocks and watches. And, while I had no idea what-so-ever what burnishing was all about, one savvy table holder made it clear that you had to have a burnisher if you ever wanted to work on clocks. I still have that burnisher, and several others that are similar - you just can’t have too many tools - especially ones as important as burnishers! Not that I knew how to use them, even when I was buying numbers two, three, and, well, you get the idea. If you would like to learn more about such burnishers I highly recommend David LaBounty’s article in the June 2006 NAWCC Bulletin, starting on page 323.
When I read David’s article I was struck by his statement “A true test of skill is burnishing a pivot by hand. It takes many hours of practice and frustration just to become moderately proficient and years before the task becomes routine.” Having tried to use commercial burnishers on the pivots in the clocks I love (Vienna Regulators), I can understand his comment. It is sort of like trying to drive a small nail with a 6 pound sledge hammer. My first MART find, and burnishers like it, is the reason it is so important for you to make your own burnisher.
Figure 1 gives a side-by-side comparison of three burnishers - the top two are commercially made, the bottom one is the burnisher handed down to me by my mentor, Ray Ashcraft.
Figure 4 – A way to hold the burnisher when sanding
It is also important that the faces of the burnisher be flat from side to side. I always check my pivot-stoning work with a burnisher to see if the pivot is truly a cylinder with flat sides. A flat burnisher will burnish the entire face of a well-stoned pivot when you lay the burnisher against the pivot. If the face of the burnisher is not flat it can not be used to test the quality of your pivot stoning. One could think of a burnisher as a “teacher” or quality control tool for pivot-stoning work.
I also leave the cross-sectional shape of my burnishers square – this allows me to burnish the shoulder of the arbor at the same time that I am burnishing the pivot.
Figure 5 shows the final shape and dimension of my new burnisher.
