Polishing a pool ladder

[n240sxguy]

It was kinda orangish rust only where it was pitted. The rest was fine. I'll take pics when I get time to work on it. I'm out of town right now.


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[danpik]

I polish stainless steel almost every day on my handmade knives. Polishing is nothing more than reducing the size of scratches in a surface until you reach an acceptable level of reflectance. When I polish steel, I start sanding with a sandpaper grit aggressive enough to remove all surface blemishes. I then progress through grits by sanding at a 45° angle to the previous grit until all previous lines are gone. I usually sand up to 2000 grit and then take my knives to the buffer with a light coloring compound. It's a lot of work but if you take shortcuts you will just have shiny scratches.

Bob

This is probably the best advice given so far. I too work in the cutlery industry and polish about 3k SF of 300 series and 400 series stainless each day. As Bob said to get it shiny you need to progressively move to finer and finer grits at each step. You can jump two grits at the most if you want. (industry standard set by the abrasive manufacturers) Once you get to the really fine 1500 and 2000 grit finishes the buffing compounds will be the next step.

As far as stainless tarnishing, it really doesn't. But, there are layers of crud that build up that the finer polishing compounds and products like barkeepers friend will remove. In fact out customer service people use it sometimes to clean up stains on blades.