Just as pencils have erasers to remove excess letters and words, so the pistolsmith must have something to remove excess metal. The bench grinder and mill are your large erasers. Using power tools you can remove large amounts of metal readily, or small amounts quickly. The mill also allows you to remove exactly-known amounts. Files, stones and emery cloth are your small erasers for fitting parts, smoothing engagement surfaces or polishing. They can be found in every gunsmithing shop as well as other machine shops in the country.
If you already have these had tools at home, they are likely to be of the common household variety. The file is coarse and usually rusty. The sandpaper is rough and made for sanding wood. Most stones I have seen around friends houses are worn, uneven and clogged with gunk. Suitable perhaps for sharpening a hunting knife (but often not even that) and entirely unsuited to the task of stoning a firearms part.
Files for your handgun must be much finer than the files intended for sharpening the lawnmower blade. Pistolsmithing files are precision tools. As such, you should treat them kindly, and never loan them. You will find that files and rasps intended for cabinet making, stock making and other woodworking tasks are too coarse. The finest-cut common wood file is too coarse for mch use on metal. However, if you buy files that are too fine, youll have to do more work (each pass will remove less metal than a coarser file would) but on the plus side you will be hard-pressed to file too much metal. At a bare minimum you will need two large files, one minimum file and a set of small ones. First, purchase an extra narrow pillar file in the Swiss #2 cut. This file, 8 inches long and just over -inch wide, is narrow enough to maneuver into and around your work, large enough to hold comfortably, and cuts smoothly enough that with the right touch will produce a near-finished or finished surface. If you cannot find them at a tool store in your hometown, Brownells carries them. I have used so many and been so pleased with each of them that I refer to it as the perfect file. It does have a drawback, and that is its flexibility. It will bend while you work with it and you have to watch out for unwanted rounding of your cut surface because of this flex.
For more detailed advice on files and other tools and techniques for smithing your pistols and revolvers, purchase Gunsmithing Pistols and Revolvers from Gun Tests.
