In this paper, a new type of wheel polishing tool is designed. Through the bevel gear structure, only one motor is used to realize the revolution and rotation of the polishing wheel, which makes the structure simple, small inertia, and stable operation. Traditional polishing wheels have a three-layer structure: Internal rigid hub, middle flexible rubber, and external polishing pad. It is found through experiments that the hardness of rubber has a greater influence on the tool influence function (TIF). Therefore, by optimizing the hardness of the rubber, we obtained a TIF very close to the Gaussian shape, which is conducive to the rapid convergence of the surface error. Finally, the effects of polishing wheel speed, polishing pressure and polishing time on the TIF, as well as the stability of the TIF, are studied through experiments. Experiments show that: (1) There is no linear relationship between the removal efficiency of the polishing wheel, the polishing wheel speed, and the polishing pressure, but as the parameter increases, the increase in the removal efficiency slows down; (2) There is a good linear relationship between the removal amount of the polishing wheel and time; (3) The TIF is very stable, and the stability of the TIF reaches 98%. © 2020 SPIE. All rights reserved.