by Shadow Catcher » Tue Jul 06, 2010 7:33 am
I just polished up our aluminum bike rack using polishing compound. What you are doing is essentially using very fine abrasive to flatten out the natural/unnatural finish of the aluminum. What we used to do to polish metal samples for microscopic examination was progressively finer grades of sandpaper moving into polishing compounds ending with a 1 micron finish diamonds paste. What you're doing is needless to say much simpler and a great deal less expensive. Depending on what you use you can come up with a mirror finish, or something less than. What I used for the bike rack was polishing compound sticks that I got from Harbor Freight and a cloth polishing wheel.