Figuring is the process of converting the shape (which is hopefully roughly spherical) that you have after you have finished polishing to a parabola which will focus the light to a PERFECT point, which a sphere will not.
Don’t try this without more then one book: it takes at least three maybe Tex, Brown and Barry to get a good idea of how to fix a given figuring problem
Figuring is all about repeating those two steps up there continually until you:
A. You have a perfect parabolic shape, or
B. You are totally tired of it and throw in the towel.
I am not going to go into the details of figuring, first of all the books don’t all agree and it is very climate and personal style specific. also I don’t want you to get scared away from mirror making by figuring's complexity(although saying that probably didn’t help), there are lots of people around that would be better at explaining it and the best way to get answers to questions is to setup a tester and have everybody look at it (esp. Gary) then poll the results and try something.
Well here are the basics of testing.
