Kcassells, Id be happy to go over polishing up the aluminum. But you mentioned chrome, the chrome pieces were the bow light and the shift handle. I had those re-chromed by a professional. Not sure that there is another way to do that.
I did buff out all of the parts for the swim ladder, which were aluminum. The mounting flanges were chrome diecast, which is very expensive to redo, as I found out when I did the bow light and shift handles. I found some new stainless ones, so I ordered them and should have them this week. As for the process of polishing up everything from this weekends pics, its fairly simple. You just have to spend a little on the right tools. The cast steps were fairly easy, the tubing was the hard part. It was clear anodized, which has to be removed before it can be polished. I have seen where this can be stripped with oven cleaner, but I haven't had much luck with that. I have always resorted to the good old fashion lots of sanding! I like to sand it out to 220 or 320. From there I use a buffer and a couple of wheels. You can used a bench grinder (assuming your wheels have the correct arbor size) but the long shafts on a buffer are helpful. I have also used a large hand held grinder before on things like truck fuel tanks (that is how I learned back in the day). You can pick up a kit with wheels and rouge fairly cheaply. I think I paid about 40$ or so for this one, it has 10" wheels and a selection of rouge.
Make sure you pay attention to the arbor size, there are a lot of them. The rouges are for different materials.....kind of like grits of sand paper depending on the metals hardness. This kit came with a pretty good guide to tell you what to use with what.
As for the wheels there is sisal, a couple of stitched and a couple non stitched loose wheels in the kit I bought. The sisal wheel is actually natural sisal, and a rough cut wheel. Never had that great of luck with them. The other wheels are cotton, either sewn or non sewn. The tighter the stitches are in the sewn, the coarser the wheel seems to be. You can see some of the stitching on a couple in the pics (second from the right top and the yellow one below it). For aluminum I use the stitched wheels as a finish wheel.
The wheel in the upper right corner is a pleated or airway wheel. I like these for the rough first cut. But this one is untreated, or soft cotton. I picked up a treated (think of it as starched, very stiff and ridgid) airway wheel from Zepher for my rough cut.
The sewn wheel is on the left and the airway is on the right. For the most part the rouges are color coded. I use a black or brown for my rough cut on the airway wheel. It makes a night and day difference in the finish. Then I use a green rouge with the sewn wheel for my final finish. You can take it farther with a loose wheel and finer rouge, but that is more for show cars etc. Hope that was helpful! And by the way I didn't give a lot for the eastwood buffer, and it has been a good one so far. I like the two speed option.
