I use lens polishing pads for the initial polish and leave the pitch to the final cleanup of the surface. As such, I can change from one polishing agent to another without any problems.
I've done initial polishing with 12 micron grit with the polishing pads and gotten a really fast polish which appeared to be of decent quality.
As to pitch, I've also used 5 micron on one occasion and gotten a fairly quick polish and just continued on with CeO to finish the polish. Pitch appears to "eat" the polishing agent after a bit of use so the grit would gradually be worked into the pitch and no longer be effective in the shaving of the glass surface to the smoothness desired.
I'll also note that I've moved from CeO to rouge for glass that was having problems with dogbiscuit (once you've seen a dogbuscuit surface, you'll know what I'm talking about) and didn't do anything but quickly wash the CeO off of the surface of the lap. The problem would go away after about 5 minutes of work with the rouge which would probably indicate how fast the pitch actually takes up the material.

• Polishing Pads... - czar7 - December 14, 2003 - 22:49 UTC
  • Re:Polishing Pads... - optics - December 16, 2003 - 23:26 UTC
    • Polishing pads.... - jkoptic - December 17, 2003 - 04:49 UTC