Joel Davis
Special Correspondent

If you can’t stand the heat, don’t get out of the kitchen — call Steven W. Anneker, the inventor of the popular Polishing Pro System. After years of trial and error, the long-time inventor has developed a new system to polish scratches out of engineered stone without disfiguring the material because of friction.     

Manufactured from a mixture of crushed stone and bound together by resin, engineered stone is a popular composite material used for kitchen countertops. There’s only one problem. It’s vulnerable to heat, which can be a recipe for disaster near stovetops.

It’s not just hot pans that are a problem for engineered stone. Normal polishing pads can wreak some unsightly havoc on it because the resin used in the mix reacts badly to the friction that is generated. Heating the composite up actually changes the chemical composition of the resin.

“All of that comes into play in designing a process in order to remove scratches and blemishes, and be able to hone that material down and create a flat surface, and bring that finish back,”  Anneker said.
It took ten years for Anneker to develop the stock Polishing Pro System, which uses a specially designed high-speed polishing pad and a proprietary mix of grit polishing powders to actually grind down the surface surrounding the scratch and polish it to match the rest of the stone.

Anneker has now developed an add-on kit for engineered stone restoration, available at www.braxton-bragg.com.

The new approach to polishing engineered stone goes “totally upside down and backward and outside the box” from earlier efforts by other inventors to develop the technology, Anneker said. “They kept attacking it like natural stone. You can’t do that. It’s approximately eighty percent resin or plastic. Envision taking plastic and running sandpaper on it and trying to get a glossy shine.”

What Anneker did was capitalize on the unique characteristics of engineered stone that result from its manufacturing process. “I chose to attack the aggregate, the harder material, first, and then to work on the resin, the softer material.”

If you take a very close look at engineered stone, you will notice that the stone particles that are suspended in the resin protrude slightly from the surface, Anneker said. “There is a textural differential to the surface. The aggregate stands up a little bit more in the slab than the resin does. Because the aggregate is harder than the resin, my theory was I could create a differential and also remove the blemish, and it did.”

By treating the aggregate first, the process spares the plastic from the excessive heat generated by grinding the much harder stone components. “Whether I damaged the resin or not, you can polish the plastic after you’ve done that,” Anneker said.

The process has been refined with the cooperation of Caesarstone, one of the top manufacturers of engineered stone, which uses up to 93 percent quartz in its products. “They requested me to do a lot of beta testing on their materials since my process works so well,” Anneker said. “I have been damaging their materials and going through the process of bringing it back. They want me to put hot pots on some of their materials that are very difficult to polish, to mimic like mama is cooking on the stove — she is in a hurry, she sets the pot on the engineered stone, she pulls it up, and, bam, you’ve got a white ring where you’ve burned the resin.”

The testing has been enjoyable for Anneker. “It’s kind of fun. It’s challenging when you’re attacking the materials. Basically, everything is working through the process. Step one, step two, step three.  We film everything and get the steps down for the process to make it easier.”

Some of the Caesarstone products are particularly challenging because of the use of vinyl in the resin, which changes its chemical composition.
“The surface will change (when exposed to heat), so you have to let the stone rest and then go through the process (again) until it goes back the way it was. Other materials are whiz, bang, done. The rest of them were a piece of cake.”

Finding a way to deal with engineered stone was a personal project for Anneker. “It’s been a long time coming,” he said. “Nobody asked me (to do it). There was a need, and I actually had been working on it prior to bringing out the original Polishing Pro System. I was tinkering with it and refining the process in order to get the system to work on the engineered stone. I was doing research and development off and on. It’s one of those things where you pay as you go and tinker in the garage.”

For more information on the Polishing Pro Engineered Stone System, call 800-575-4401 or please visit the Braxton-Bragg website at www.braxton-bragg.com/polishingpro.