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Posted by Robert May on July 3, 2001 18:36:55 UTC

I suggest that you go and research mirror making on the web. There's a lot of different articles and they all have slightly different ways of saying the same basic thing.
As to the problem at hand, you have just gotten done digging a hole in the middle of the glass and now you need to make that hole sort of spherical. This is done with Center Over Center strokes of moderate length. Don't forget to rotate the mirror in your hand and walk around the tool as you do this or you can end up with some fancy saddle shaped surface.
As you shorten up the stroke, you take less material off of the center of the mirror and more even it out to a spherical shape. As you use finer grits, the shape becomes even more spherical as the two surfaces are closer in contact with each other.
The process really is quite simple and with the few basic rules, anybody can make a well ground out mirror - figuring is something else that needs to be thought about tho.

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