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how I got my mirror finish

S

Sniper82

Lifer
Well I didn't have no real fine sand paper. But I did have a burial pad(kind you clean guns with) and it works great. Took me about 5mins of rubbing to shine it up. I didn't get it perfect but I can see myself good in it.

I used a lite burial pad not the kind you wash dishes with(don't use the kind with soap in it). No need to rub the heatsink hard just do it lightly and fast. Works great.
 
Burial pad? It's called(or used to be called) Brillo pad. That was the name brand of the potscrubbing pad, are they still in business? Anyway, don't use the Brillo brand with the soap in it, go to Brownells and get the #0000 steel wool. It's used with a little CLP to take surface rust off of firearms without harming the delicate(& valuable if left intact) Blued surface.

And as an added bonus it should be good for polishing up a cpu surface. Although, it'll be very hard to get a perfectly flat surface to mate up with the HSF, abrasive paper would still work better. Or try India Stones.

Guess I'll have to break out my old gunsmithing tools & turn em loose on my computer 😀

 
So is isn't a burial pad? I figured gun enthusiasts had there own unusual terminology.

Somehow "burial pad" seemed appropriate.

Lot's of places have 00000 steel wool. Home Depot. It is used a lot in the place of sandpaper when sanding between coats of varnish. The thing now considered better for fine finishing is plastic wool (Scotchbrite). It has some abrasive in the plastic I guess. It doesn't rust and doesn't leave behind reactive particles.

There seems to be an idea around that making a surface shiney is the purpose of lapping. More important is getting it perfectly flat so it mates as well as possible with the CPU slug. Put a metal ruler up against the surface of your HS and look at the uneveness of the crack by holding it in front of light. Use several orientations of the ruler. Cheap heatsinks usually aren't very flat. They are finished by holding them against a belt sander, which is fast but error prone. On of my GC68s (from SVC) was terrible, the other was acceptible.
 
Some ppl call it different than others. But they are similar. You knew what I was talking about 😀. Anyway this seemed to work faster than sand paper.

Lapped one a while back with sand paper and it seemed to take forever compared to this.
 
I would think getting a heatsink surface flat using 600 grit sandpaper would be more beneficial than simply buffing the bottom to a mirror finish. Am I wrong?
 
A lot sites will show you a picture of how they polished up their HS. There will be a perfect image of something reflected off the bottom. That shows it is smooth, but it doesn't show it is flat.

Now take the slugs of CPUs: The manufacturers have been honing them flat for a couple of years now, but they don't resemble mirrors. Why not? I'm sure people would be very impressed! OTOH if you pop the top off an Intel P4, the flip chip WILL look like a mirror. The surface of those things are perfect within a few atoms.
 
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