Hand Polishing Small Bike Parts?

I polished the seat clamp, axle, brake hose ends, and crank arms on my first Ripmo.
I used a bench grinder with a well worn stainless steel wire brush wheel to mechanically strip the black ano from the parts. Time over pressure. Deep scratches greatly increase polishing effort. Built  shine from there with varying grades of both scotch brite and polishing compound.
The better your final finish, the less maintenance required to maintain. No clear coating required. 

Still running all of these parts on a Ripmo V2 and they’ve held up well.


 

Soaking parts in oven cleaner works well for stripping, and then purple scotch brite pads to further clean it up. Sandpaper away for the polished finish. Mother's auto wax to really make it shine.

This. Oven cleaner removes the annodizing (or annodized color) it can make it so easy. But I found some parts fully resisted the oven cleaner. I don't know the why for the resistance.

Here's how oven cleaner/scotch brite turned out on my cranks and seatpost clamp. 

I've used a dremel with a polishing attachment and that's worked pretty well. 

I vote heavy duty oven cleaner, so much easier to polish if you dont scratch it up by grinding the anodizing off. And the only way to get in tight spaces. You can fill thread holes with grease so it doesn't eat away at those, but be sure the surfaces you want to strip are really degreaser. 

Spray it, let it sit for 10 minutes and give it a rinse to see what you got. Then dry and repeat as needed. Some stuff with heavier machining marks takes a few more soakings. Scotch brite can finish off stubborn spots, or even just the aluminum polish you finish with. Drano also has the same chemical as the HD oven cleaner, but seems to be more gentle so if you have stubborn spots sometimes a drano soak can finish it off without eating the other bare aluminum. If you dont polish with something like Mothers, it will tarnish to way beyond satin, almost chalky looking. But a little polish will take that away and leave it looking nice. 

Wear gloves and dont get the oven cleaner in your eyes

SRAM NX Eagle cranks were dipped in a sodium hydroxide solution with hot water for about two minutes, followed by extensive machine sanding and hand polishing, and finished with a final coat of wax.  Use caution when working with sodium hydroxide, as it produces heavy bubbling and hazardous fumes. 

I cover shit in oven cleaner all the time.  It IS very caustic.  I will usually make a lean-to out of cardboard outside and spray on a mild, windless day wearing the same elbow length gloves and face shiled I use while glopping aircraft paint stripper onto painted frames.

If i want to strip something like some black ano non-eyeleted rims so I can polish them, I take them to a local anodizer and have them dip to strip the ano, because a part that big is a pain to strip with oven cleaner.  If your local ano spot is nice, they might electro-polish the stripped stuff for ya too. That will significantly reduce the amount of hand work you need to do to get a good mirror finish.

Instead of clear coating your self-polished stuff, be prepared to touch-up/re-polish as needed… You will mess up clear yourself and end up having a crappy, cloudy, hard to fix mess.

7 series vs 6 series. Ran into the same thing on my patrol build. 6 series aluminum strips much easier 

I did the oven cleaner route on my patrol build. Definitely recommend, just make sure you have good ventilation or do it outside. 
Make sure you’re getting a chemical cleaner with Lye in it and not a citrus cleaner, otherwise nothing will happen. Chemical cleaners seem to be a bit harder to find these days. 
I clear coated all my small parts like fork caps and pivot caps, definitely recommend it. Everbrite Protectaclear works incredibly well. Can get small bottles on amazon for reasonable prices. I put a couple coats on the shock linkage, and even after a year of doing frame stands (surfing) it hadn’t rubbed off. 

https://www.everbritecoatings.com/protectaclear

Any Europhiles on here that know of a strong oven cleaner available here? Preferably somewhere near Germany. 

I’ve tried but the stuff I found is weak sauce. I think I’ve read that there are euro regulations that affect caustic cleaning products available to consumers but can’t quite recall now.

Can you buy pure NaOH at hardware stores?

There are some people that would be very disappointed in me for not recalling my basic chemistry.

Cheers mate! Just ordered some from Amazon.

😓

These cranks will get soaked on Monday when my Mothers shows up.  

Oven Cleaner , bath, scotch brite clean, easy Mothers and then sanding them with various wet/dry sandpaper, then more light scotch brite.

It's gonna be a beautiful brushed finish, then Im going to re apply new decals and give it 2 or 3 coats of Gtechnique Crystal Ceramic Serum.

Love the polished stuff but brushed if done right looks cool too.

I also want to point out and remind everyone that housewives and people so inclined have been using oven cleaner to clean ovens in "un ventilated" kitchens for 75 years...

Be careful but FFS it's not Plutonium.

😆

After 2 soaks.

Look how durable the logos are and that they were white and are now black.....

After this pic I did some preliminary first stage sanding with 180 Aluminum oxide and these are gonna look sick with a brushed finish.

Hour and a half start to where they are at.  I have to straighten out some brush strokeage and add decals and 2-3 coats of ceramic sauce.

I also believe that the logos are laser etched into the surface.  That can not be any sort of decal.