Welcome to a web page that talks about all things polishing. Whether it’s metal polishing, plastic polishing or you need help picking and choosing the right tools for a little bit of DIY polishing at home, we’ve got you covered. Stay tuned to our blog where we’ll cover all the more important topics surrounding metal and plastic polishing. Continue reading to find out who’s behind English Custom Polishing.
English Custom Polishing is a small web portal dedicated to the fine art of plastic and metal polishing. Polishing is a trade that has been with us for quite some time. I’m Tom, and I’ve earned my retirement running a polishing company in New England. My son James took over the business, and he does most of the work nowadays. I jump in from time to time for some of the bigger gigs. I’ve been retired for about 7 years now, and the job has changed quite a bit since I left work. My son recently started offering polishing services for the most surprising of items. We’re talking electrical cabinets, music boxes, instrument cases (guitars and violins) and we even had a situation where one enthusiast brought in his high end video drone under $1000 for polishing. Anything and everything that can be polished, we are here to offer help.
My company is my life’s work and it’s what allowed me to raise my family, but it’s not what this website is going to be about. As a retiree I’ve been focusing more and more on projects that I could never quite get started while I was being a head of a company. Projects like this website where I’ll technically still be talking about the job I did for a living, but only in a more laid back role. I’ll try to plug my sons company from time to time, when they have more interesting projects, but for the most part I’ll be sharing with the world a general advice on metal and plastic polishing. One of the projects that I will definitely be covering is the aforementioned racing drone polishing. I’ve never heard anyone polishing these gadgets. Apparently there was an accident, and the owners’ expensive selfie drone got stuck in the mud. He cleaned it himself as much as they could, but they needed our help to get into all the nooks and crannies.
Polishing metals and plastic takes a lot of skill, depending of course what it is that gets polished. Over the years I’ve worked with all kinds of products and tools, so I’ve got a lot of experience that I’d like to share with the world. Recently I’ve discovered that there’s a large number of YouTube channels that features polishing and pressure washing of all kinds of materials. I really enjoy watching those, and I’d like to see my son expand the business someday to offering similar services. The three type of services that we do offer are:
Our little company focuses on offering three main groups of services, metal polishing, plastic polishing and the sale of polishing tools and products. My son is however working on expanding the services that we’re offering, so expect this to update soon.
Metal polishing is something that my family has officially been doing for three generations now. My father was the first metal polishing business in the area, which was a side-product of him being a metalworker. Over the years, as he was working in the metal industry he figured out that he enjoys polishing items, and giving old discarded pieces of metal life once again. That’s when he started focusing more and more on polishing and started working on the business that he then passed on to me, and I now passed on to my son.
Metal polishing is used to achieve a large number of effects. It can either be to improve the appearance of an object, to prevent decay via corrosion, or as a preparation for applying pain. Plenty of other applications exist where polishing is needed. Polishing is done in two main ways, either mechanically or chemically. Those are the two main ways that we do it here at English Custom Polishing. One thing that needs to be said is that polishing is often confused with buffing. I’ll explain the difference between the two on our blog so stay tuned.
Plastic polishing is something that my son got into. To tell you to truth, I’m not entirely sure how exactly he manages to polish plastics, but he does do it. It’s mostly done on car, truck or tractor dashboards. On rare occasions we get an inquiry about doing something a little bit more unique, like the previously mentioned remote controlled done. It was a pain getting it all polished up, but we did it and the gadget looked as good as new.
One major difference between polishing metal and plastic is obviously that metal is a much more robust material. Hence you don’t need to be as careful when polishing it. Polishing plastic sets limitations on what kind of chemical products can be used and also on what kind of tools can be used. This is of course speaking in general. On a case by case basis, things are much more different. Plastic varies in type, and some can be quite resilient to even rougher polishing. More on that later. Suffice it to say, we also do plastic polishing, thanks to my son James.
Selling polishing tools and products is something that I started doing back in the 90s I think. It could be that it was late 80s. Anyway, what drove me to retail is the ever increasing number of requests that I was getting from my clients who wanted to know if they can buy the tools that I used for polishing and the polishing products as well. At first I was hesitant, because I didn’t think I’d be able to juggle between offering a service a taking care of the retail side of the business. What’s more there weren’t that many dedicated polishing tools on the market.
That was at first, as time went on I could hire help and it made sense to get into retail. That was also right about when tool manufactures started creating electrical polishing tools en mass. The stars aligned, it would seem, and I started selling polishing machines of all shapes and sizes, alongside polishing products. For small time projects, there’s no point there’s no point going to professional polishing businesses. I realize this might not be a smart thing to say for someone in my line of work, but it’s the truth. Same thing is true for pretty much every other business out there. I’ll try to make reviews and give recommendations on what I think are polishing tools and products worthy of purchase.
Here’s a quick shot of our workshop where most of the magic happens. This is where I worked my entire life. Hopefully my son will someday be in the position to expand this workshop, or to build a new one from scratch. A lot of the tools there I inherited from my father. Polishing machines are of course the most prominent tool in the shop. There’s a plethora of others as well, too many for me to count them all here. I’ll setup a gallery soon where you’ll be able to see more of the shop. Stay tuned.
I realize that I’m just an old guy who’s way past his prime. With this website I hope to cling onto what little youthful enthusiasm for trying new things there is in me. I wish you’d join me on the journey of discovering not just the secrets of metal polishing, but also on discovering new interesting methods for washing, polishing, buffing and restoring the appearance of aged metal and plastic. I’ll be here, see you around.