“Linishing”: Getting the Chrome Bumper Look

I spent all day yesterday figuring out how to silkscreen onto polypropylene: a stressful, tiring, and lengthy process — but one that turned out well. I was hoping that today’s task would be easier. Thankfully it was.

What I wanted to do today was to give my Naim shoebox cases the “Chrome Bumper” (“CB”) look, which is accomplished by “linishing” — i.e., sanding the paint off the front edge.

It seems that Naim did this with a belt sander, with heavy 50-grit sandpaper. You can see the lines from the rough sandpaper on original CB kit, always running horizontally.

Well, I don’t have a belt sander, but I figured I could get the same effect with a few simple hand tools. Indeed, I did.

Here’s what I used:

• 50 grit sandpaper
• Sanding blocks (I would have only used the big one if I hadn’t run out of big pieces of sandpaper)
• Files
• A box to put the case in to catch all the aluminum and paint 🙂

My process was as follows:

• Remove the paint with the sanding block
• File out any deep ruts that remain
• Sand again, always going in the proper horizontal direction, to give the finished look.

Here they are partway through:

And here they are finished (linished!):

Then it was time for a photo shoot. I thought the Paradise fasciae looked good yesterday: in the CB-ed cases I think they look amazing.

As a reminder, this is the “before” shot:

And “after”: