Angi over at Blanks for Stamping has made this excellent video showing tips on polishing aluminium (in this case stamping blanks) with some of our products. We really recommend a watch as it gives a great starting point for finishing Aluminium of all shapes and sizes.
Aluminium is a soft metal, it scratches like mad! This property however does make it simple to polish. As ever adequate scratch removal and flattening dictates the result. Any ripples or scratches left behind will show in the final polish.
The best thing to use is either wet and dry or micromesh. This applies regardless of scale, be it an alloy wheel or a small aluminium pendant.
Either felts or mops are then used for the polishing stage. For large items a loosefold mop will do the trick something like a ‘G’ to start then a ‘WDR’ to finish. A white stitched mop is a good option too before using the WDR mop, this will give a bit more cut and speed the job up.
For small items I recommend little mounted stitched mops in ‘G’ or ‘WDR’ followed by a mounted soft calico mop.
As for compounds, the blue and brown bars in the video are a great start…
Generally for aluminium a cutting bar is used first to remove remaining fine scratches, it’s normally brown in colour (ours is called apollo). This is followed by a polishing bar to bring up the shine, this is normally blue, green or white. We do several bars that could be used for this stage, 2000D, Sunblue, 309BX or the ultimate polishing bar FF9.
Aluminium is messy, it creates a nasty black residue which can be a problem. It must be removed before it cools and goes hard. It can go rock hard and be stubborn then to remove. We suggest a bag of vienna lime applied by dipping in a lint free cloth and wiping the surface.
*ding* after all that you should have a pretty nifty shine.