Taking a scratch out of marble - how to?

[Todd Burch]

New bathroom carrarra marble countertop has a scratch in it. Not too deep. Dad sanded it out, and now it needs polishing. Area is about 1/2 the size of your palm.

Using common woodworking tools, (sanders / ROS's, etc.), what can be used to polish it? I've polished Corian using white abrasive pads & water on my ROS - that worked very good.

Will automotive compounds work? Any speed considerations for power buffing? Will hand buffing get it?

I would rather use something I already have than purchase a special product (unless the special compound is cheap and the cat's meow.)

Thanks, Todd

[Bruce Volden]

Todd,

If you search for "marble polishing" it will pop up and tell you how it's done---really easy and inexpensive and straightforward.

One thing I would highly recommend is a dust mask as it has been known to cause silicosis, something noone wants.

Bruce

[Kevin Bourque]

I had to repair a broken 3'x7' marble table top a few months back. The total length of the break was about 2 feet long and involved several broken pieces of marble. After epoxying the pieces back together I sanded the area down using progressively finer grits of wet/dry sandpaper. I rented a small hand held polisher from Home Depot and it made all the difference in the world. It was much faster than a ROS. I forget which grit I ended up with , but it was probably around 2000 grit. After that I applied a special marble sealer. Maybe took 2 hours total time to do all the sanding/polishing.

When I first took a look at the repair I thought it would be impossible to fix, but it's amazingly difficult to see the repair unless you know where to look.