Polishing the Frame

My situation was a series of scratches on the frame where the previous owner had slid the bike on the ground. Always bothered me. So I found numerous web sites mentioning their owners' polishing exploits but with few pictures of the process, and I was nervous. So what you get here is another webisite with my polishing exploits and few pictures - it's really hard to take pictures of shiny things, so the 'in process' shots don't exist.

Process:
1) Remove the hard anodizing. I used wet/dry 100 grit sandpaper and two solid weekends' worth of elbow-grease.
2) Work from 100 grit through 220, 320, and 400 grit. Change your direction of sanding every time you change grits and it'll be a lot easier to see when you're 'done' with that grit.
3) After the we/dry sandpaper, work through red, white, and brown polishing rouge.

buffing chammy	workspace and grinder
progress1	progress2

Some notes from my experience:
1) Let the sandpaper dow the work! When your progress seems to slow down, get a new piece of sand paper, it's chaep. Don't try to 'get your money's worth' from something so minor and so frustratingly time-consuming.
2) Be patient with the process and do not skip steps. The lustre of a good polish job is direclty proportional to the evenness of the early prep-work.
3) Give yourself plenty of time to do the job and spread it out over many weekends. No one has the muscle endurance to do the job in one or two weekends without cutting corners. When you're exhausted, you'll cheat.
4) Get a cheap angle-grinder and expect to use it up doing one frame. I got a solid Black & Decker unit - maybe $45 and while I think B&D make good stuff, this thing is pretty well spent. The output shaft bearings are loud and loose and I'm not quite finished.
5) Use 'edge-on' buffing wheels as opposed to the 'full face' chammy pads. The wheels are made for bench grinders and you might need to adjust the hole size but they are vastly superior to the chammy pads. The wheels last longer, allow higher spin speeds, allow higher pressures, hold rouge more evenly, and can get into various nooks and crannies that the pads can't reach.