Our Mini has a lot of stainless steel trim, and most of it is showing its age. Luckily it’s fairly easy to polish, though some of the deeper scratches and dents needed a bit of hammering and sanding first.
First we give everything a bloody good clean- most of it was full of mud, spiders, and overspray in various colours.
Wet sanding with progressively finer sandpaper (finishing with 2000 grit)
A damn good polish on the buffing wheel- it turns out that it’s important to use the correct polishing compound for the metal you’re polishing. Jeweller’s rouge, which I had on hand, doesn’t do a great job on stainless steel. Since I couldn’t find any Green compound, I tried good old Autosol polish- and it worked a treat, albeit a bit splattery.
A final tidy up by hand and we’re done.
A small obsession 