Originally Posted by
Lonnie
As you stated, the brushed-stainless steel, is just that: brushed with a grain pattern or texture with wire brushes during the manufacturing process for appearance reasons. You can, indeed, "buff" stainless to a high mirror-like luster, but since your sheet already has grain structure on it, this is a VERY tedious process to do.
Also, as you may have found out, stainless comes in various "grades". 400 series is cheap stainless and the lower-numbered grades are actually magnetic and will rust (think Chinese-made "inexpensive" cutlery). The 300 series is most common, usually 302 or 304, which is most likely what you have. Surgical stainless is usually 316.
Stainless steel is very difficult to work with from a machining and welding standpoint because of its high chrome content. Unless you have access to a grinder Or are willing to sand with emery cloth on a vibrating sander for a long time, your stainless steel grain may not come out. That, and you will produce the blackest, dirtiest hands and work area imaginable!
Having worked in mechanical design on food grade machinery that required stainless-steel for wash down requirements, one of the biggest over-looked areas in stainless steel was not specifying the proper finish on stainless steel sheet work. It can be rough grained (1A or 1B ) or all the way to a mirror-like shine (4A). Why was this important?? Imagine getting your food processing machine with enclosure boxes and doors, guards and covers in three different grain structures running in "different" directions on the same machine! It looked "cheap" and very unprofessional. So not only was it important to specify the grade of stainless steel, it was also very important to specify the finish on the sheet metal AND the direction of the grain structure on the drawing orthographic views (front view, top view, left or right views , for those who took drafting in high school) of the guards and covers so it looked uniform though-out the whole machine. A supervisor had to "emphasize" this to an "uninformed" CAD drafter (me!) that this needed to be specified (IE, written or denoted within the bill of material metal description) on all detail drawings for enclosure boxes and doors, guards and covers to avoid this embarrassing visual faux pas on future machinery. Not all stainless steel sheets are alike, and if you do not tell your sheet metal fabricators or vendors what is EXACTLY required, you could end up with something other than was the design-intent !!
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