A variety of polishing wheels was used depending on the polishing stage and abrasive used: broken scroll, cast scroll, emery ring, concentric ring, contained abrasive brick, hemp rope buffer, coco mat (from India), and felt buffer. Improved designs for polishing wheel surfaces, in which a number of discontinuous curved grooves or raised ribs were arranged in a spiral pattern that forced the abrasive between the wheel and the stone, were patented by Samuel H. Mills of Montpelier in 1907 and 1923 and William Milne of Barre in 1927 and 1941.

Bed setters placed multiple stones in a level bed so that they could be simultaneously polished by the gate-type polisher. Paper was stuffed into the cracks between the stones and, using a wooden paddle, the remaining cracks were filled with plaster just below the top of the stones. The plaster both held the stones in place and kept the abrasive on the surface and in action.

Large and expensive "automatic" line polishers were employed by a few companies that polished a high volume of stone. For example, Rock of Ages (ca. 1915-20) operated a machine in which an electric motor-driven vertical shaft, supported by a steel bridge-like framework, drove four 4-foot diameter polishing wheels. Stone-supporting carriages moved along a runway under the polishing wheels. The polishing wheels overlapped and thus covered the full width of the carriage.

At the other end of the spectrum was the manual polisher that was only suitable for occasional small jobs such as might be found at a granite retailer. An example in the Vermont Granite Museum's collection has a 68-inch long arm with a polishing wheel at one end. The arm can be moved so the polishing wheel will reach any point on a horizontal plane. The polisher is operator-powered by a crank handle geared to the polishing wheel. The polisher came with three wheel types: an iron wheel with four spiral grooves for initial grinding, an iron wheel with a smooth surface for closing up, and a wooden wheel to which a buffing cloth was attached for final polishing.

Gate-type polishers took up less shed floor space than the large line polishers. Also, only the number of gate-type polishers needed for the polishing volume had to be purchased. The two-bed gate-type polisher, in which one bed was set while the other was polished, provided much of the continuous operation benefits of the line polishers and as a result mostly replaced the latter over time.