Cerium Oxide

[J-Man]

I have some of this stuff at home and want to try it out, but I don't want to make my windows worse that they already are...

Has anyone messed around with this stuff? What steps should I take?

I've thought of sanding the glass with some fine grits like start with 1000 0r 1500 then move on up to 2500 or above. After that make a slurry of the cerium oxide and start polishing...

thx!

[Mike Phillips]

Re: Cerium Oxide

Sounds like one of those projects that's good for the glass that nobody cares about...

If you do this, please document with before, process and after pictures of your success or failure and especially if you're process fails as this will help others to keep from making a mistake on their glass.

Also for what it's worth, ADS has a couple of kits for this, so if the glass is important you might want to check out a known system before experimenting with your own system.

If the glass is on a junker car that no one drives anymore then by all means... experiment...

For what it's worth, over the years we've tried things like this but never with any luck.

Glass just doesn't lend itself to be abraded with the end-result looking good and looking clear.

[J-Man]

Re: Cerium Oxide

I have bad cameras... cell phone one is no good, one broken, other was dropped in water... none of them will show very good. I'll see what i can do, and I think I'll go to a junkyard and get a glass and try and see what happens. Thanks for the information!

[edited to make language more family friendly]

[Jimmy The Detailer]

Re: Cerium Oxide

This should be of interest to you - Polishing Glass With Cerium Oxide

[J-Man]

Re: Cerium Oxide

This should be of interest to you - Polishing Glass With Cerium Oxide

thanks you!
i think I will try and find some glass or go to a pick a part and try it out before i do it on a vehicle...

[Jimmy The Detailer]

Re: Cerium Oxide

You're welcome J-Man, glad to help

[Mike Phillips]

Re: Cerium Oxide

This should be of interest to you - Polishing Glass With Cerium Oxide

This is a good example of why we relaxed our rules about sharing clickable links in the body of a message.

We're here to help our customers by solving their problems but we don't always have the perfect product for every need and we realize in some cases there are solutions available. As long as member's don't abuse our good will there won't be any problems and should someone abuse the forum rules then all we have to do is enforce them and the problem will go away.


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[dietoremain]

Re: Cerium Oxide

yo street welcome to MOL!
Yeah if you can get any pics of your process i'd love to see.
Hows the detailing plans?
(see mike im bringing custom tacos ppl over here haha).

[J-Man]

Re: Cerium Oxide

yo street welcome to MOL!
Yeah if you can get any pics of your process i'd love to see.
Hows the detailing plans?
(see mike im bringing custom tacos ppl over here haha).

Thanks man! You'll see me post whoring a lot on here now... i love it!!!!

[dietoremain]

Re: Cerium Oxide

Thanks man! You'll see me post whoring a lot on here now... i love it!!!!

See I told you you'd catch on.
Anyway whats this product?

[J-Man]

Re: Cerium Oxide

See I told you you'd catch on.
Anyway whats this product?

Yep!
Learning a lot; I'm making a list for my first full detail... lot of spending to do...
Cerium Oxide is some powder-like chemical that is used to polish glass... kind of looks like baking soda, but in a rusty red color...
i'll mess around with this later on, cause i want to start on the detailing... I hope to get most of the things on my list today, so i'll go check out some prices...

[oldmodman]

Re: Cerium Oxide

I have used ceruim oxide for it's original intended purpose, which is doing the final figuring of astronomical mirrors. And I have also used it on badly scratched automotive glass. To use it on car glass make a thick slurry of the powdered cerium oxide and water. Then use a hard felt bob in a drill motor to do the polishing. Here's a source of the felt bobs http://www.caswellplating.com/buffs/feltbobs.htm

Just remember, that just like polishing out a scratch in paint, you are removing glass down to the level of the bottom of the scratch. The difference is that with paint you are worried about going through the clearcoat, but in glass you should worry about removing so much that you make a distortion in the glass. If you have a junk piece of auto glass you should put a representative type of scratch into it then polish it out.

But first, one question. Do you have optical grade or industrial grade? Optical grade is 99.9% pure while industrial is 90% I have never used anything but the optical grade. When I worked for Zeiss I would use it to repair old, no longer available optical glass to a usable figure, before optical recoating.