Polishing Pads
Lapmaster offers Polishing Pads in a range of sizes and materials to fit almost any application. The pads come with plain or adhesive backing for mounting to machine plates and can be used for polishing a wide variety of materials including metals, glass, semiconductor materials, and more.
Polishing Pads
A polishing pad is a thin disc of fabric or synthetic adhered to the flat surface of a polishing plate. It is used to produce the highest quality scratch free reflective surface finishes using diamond abrasive or chemical polishing agents. Polishing with a pad is considered a “soft polishing” technique because pad materials always have some amount of compliance. The thickness and hardness of the pad determines the compliance. Thicker, softer pads allow the components to sink down into the pad, which produces a radius at the contact edge circumference. The radius or “edge dubbing” prevents the component from being polished flat from edge to edge.
Polishing Pad Recommendations
Selecting the most appropriate polishing pad for an application requires experience and knowledge. This is why Lapmaster operates an applications laboratory to develop processes for machining customer's components. Prior to recommending a specific polishing pad it is suggested that Lapmaster be consulted with the application data so that our experience can be used to select the most appropriate pad.
Lapmaster offers a variety of the more common soft polishing pads in diameters up to 36 inches (914.4mm). Larger diameters generally cannot be supplied in one piece because the manufacturers do not produce the pad materials in a width any wider than 36 inches. Larger diameter pads are usually made in two or three pieces, but this poses difficulty when installing on a polishing plate.
Listed below are the standard polishing pads offered by Lapmaster and some of the more common applications for which they are utilized. By no means is this intended to be an all- inclusive, definitive recommendation chart.Lapmaster Polishing Pads are offered in a wide range of sizes and are made from different types of materials to accommodate almost any polishing application, including Metallographic, petrographic, fiber optics, and many more.
- Pellon - A low cost, rigid, relatively durable material used for general polishing of metals where surface quality is not extremely precise.
- Lapmaster Supreme - A long life polyurethane polishing pad. Excellent for final polishing with alumina or colloidal silica. Available with PSA backing only.
- ASF - A medium cost, woven, synthetic silk fabric laminated to a compressible backing material. This pad is used to produce extremely high quality scratch free mirror surface roughness on metal and ceramic components where edge rounding is not a concern.
- ASFL - A medium cost, woven, synthetic silk fabric laminated to a firm, thin backing material. This pad is used to produce extremely high quality scratch free mirror surface roughness on metal and ceramic components where edge rounding cannot be tolerated.
- Suba 500 - A medium cost, very firm polyurethane impregnated polyester felt material used for higher stock removal polishing applications requiring high precision surfaces. Common applications include plated memory discs, aluminum, tungsten, silicon, ceramic, plastic and glass.
