As English in not my home langue, I have sometimes difficulties to understand clearly the difference between buffing and polishing. I guess buffing means polishing with felt wheel (more harder) and polishing is made with cloth wheel (very soft wheel). https://www.cmpionline.com/polishing-vs-buffing-the-differences
Maybe Supersharp is one volunteer even we are living in different side of globe
It is for sure that I will order soonest buffing wheels from the Blademaster so that I can compare different buffing wheels. I will publish some video from my very first test during the weekend. Today I am too tired to start editing / uploading video to Youtube. Stay tuned on Youtube.
Marc, many thanks for challenging me!
Even to native English speakers, polishing and buffing are hard to distinguish, as tstop4me points out. I think they are used to mean the same thing a lot of the time, even though it makes sense that there is a distinction. Like so many things, if it's a technical term in your field, you have a specific meaning for it (such as cement vs concrete...to many people they are used interchangeably but to an engineer, they are not the same thing at all).
I am very happy to take up the challenge and skate on the buffed/polished/gleaming blades. I'm very curious to see if the edge is truly preserved. I have tested hand-honing blades after sharpening both on my own skates and on others, and everyone agreed that the additional polishing feels great. Since that time, I have tuned my machine better and switched to the Blademaster Ruby wheels, which is giving me a smoother finish than the hand-honing was before. I know that additional hand-honing would get the blades closer to perfect, but it is so easy to slip out of the groove and dull and edge that I have not been hand-honing anymore. When my blades are ready to be sharpened, I can see that the ice has polished the groove to a smoother finish, and I can feel that there is a little bit more drag when I get back on the ice. It has created sort of a love/hate relationship with sharpening my blades, because my favorite stage is sharp enough but getting smooth enough that I have that perfect combination of good edges without anything seeming grabby, and glorious flow. I'm very curious to see if polishing the blade can basically allow me to have this feeling right away.
I will look for some kind of buffing wheel locally and report back after I give it a try.