Dremel polishing wheels - video

[WmRMeyers]

I'd be more inclined to use a razor knife and carefully slice the adhesive backing off the things before I tried stacking them up and loading them with any kind of polishing medium. That sticky stuff will prevent you getting the most useful life out of the wheels and end up forcing you to change felt four times as often as if you get rid of the adhesive. And I have to figure a lutier would not want a bunch of sticky stuff getting into his work, especially on old guitars and such.

Also, and your mileage may vary, I stick a pair of tiny thin washers I punched out of a steel can lid (I used steel from the lid of a can of corned beef hash but kidney beans will work in a pinch...) and sandwich my felt pads between them on the mandrel. One time I even cut a shirt notch in the washers and bent down one side of the roughly 1/16" notch to act like a little tooth so that the felt didn't slip between the washers. You line that single tooth up on opposite sides so that, just to illustrate, the bottom washer cuts into the felt at 12:00 and the cop washer cuts in at 6:00.

That may be a lot of extra work, and the juice may genuinely not be worth the squeeze, but you only need to do it once, and the washers are only about 1/4", maybe 5/16" across on a one inch felt wheel, and they help the screw get a firm grip on the polishing medium.

I love Dremels. I'm a knifemaker in a wheelchair-accessible workshop so my Dremel is a frequent help in my work.

Having thrown a blade across a room with a buffing wheel exactly once, I wouldn't go that way at all, personally. Though that is not really what you suggest, it is how I read it the first time. Probably a good idea the way you actually describe it. And the first thought I had when I watched his video was wondering why he wasn't using washers. I don't think it would be all that hard to do a good job of centering the felts to be drilled. My first rotary tool was a Weller Mini-Shop rotary tool. I finally destroyed it about a dozen years ago, and couldn't find another, so I've been using Dremel ever since. They can be very useful, and they can be very easy to misuse, as well. I've probably done more in the way of misusing them than is my fair share, too. Or I'd still have my Weller.

Bill