Polishing/painting conduit conduit

Has anyone tried to paint or polish their conduit? or if you think it would even do much? My thought would be smoother rail = smoother movement. My local conduit also has stamp marks all up and down it at 1 inch intervals and I’m concerned it may affect the end result. (still printing)

Forget immediately about painting them. The paint would wear in a matter of minutes, and then will mess up the outside race of your bearings.

Polishing them sounds like a hassle, Forget about that too.

There is no point in doing that, if you want a smooth movement, just make sure that your bearings are perfectly clean or change for better tubes.

 

I did sand my conduit. The clearances were too tight in some parts if I did not. In addition it rolls much smoother. Looks prettier too. It is a bit of work but not too bad. The stamping on the conduit just needs to be placed somewhere there are no bearings. Running one of the bearings on the flat weld seemed to work the best for me. YMMV.

Sandy

Any type of wet lube or polish will catch dust and turn into a cake on the tubes.

I’ve thought about using Johnson’s paste wax like you do on cast iron table tops, but I haven’t had any problems with the raw tubes to bother messing with it.

If you get some of the dry lube, then you can rub some of that onto the tubes, but I’m not sure if it would really do anything. The clearance on the parts is tight and the bearings run smooth enough.

 

The bearings start to wear the conduit smooth, my XY was kind of jittery because my conduit was pretty rough, so I made a quick program that ran both axes limit to limit for a while and things got better.

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