International Business Machines Corporation

Donald L Mabe

James Aloysius Hagan

Dennis Leonard Fox

Frederick Paul Benning

Kerry R Lindemann

A dressing disk for dressing and reconditioning the polishing pad of a planetary disk polishing machine is fabricated by plating a nickel/diamond matrix layer onto a stainless steel disk wherein the matrix layer thickness is developed or plated to a thickness which leaves exposed about 25 percent of the fine diamond particles, thereby forming a surface that has the look and feel of medium to coarse sandpaper. The dressing disks are inserted into the holes in a disk carrier of a planetary polishing machine and driven by its central rotary drive. While being so driven under a flow of water to carry away abraded particles, a pair of polishing pads are engaged with the disk surfaces and forced together with a loading or down force to cause the disks to abrade or grind away a thin surface layer of the polishing pad, thereby removing glazing and exposing cerium particles embedded in the urethane matrix of the polishing pad to engage the glass disks to be polished to a very smooth surface for use as substrates for magnetic memory disks useable in disk drives.

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Chatfield, MN, United States of America

Donald L Mabe