Polishing Regular Steel- what do you know about it?

[MychesterCNC]

Every single search I do on Youtube, Google, anything- everything is about polishing aluminum or if I specificy "steel" in the search, it only comes back on Stainless Steel.

Suppose I have a part that is made of carbon or tool steel, how can I polish it like I would a piece of aluminum...?

Aluminum is the basic run-down of the grits with sandpaper, then finishing off with an abrasive polish, but what would I do to get the most shine (that is possible) from regular steel? I realize it would be a LOT more work because of the hardness, what would I use?

Any suggestions or tips would be GREATLY appreciated.

(Also, is cold rolled steel/tool steel THAT much harder than stainless...?)

Thanks guys!

[Perfect Circle]

Steel can be done just like the Al. process
1st grit one direction
2nd grit and finer 90 deg. to that then repeat with finer and finer grits.
Then you can use some polishing compound. to get a mirror finish.

[MychesterCNC]

Because of the hardness, do you have to use any special kind of sandpaper?

[Perfect Circle]

Whats the Rockwell or Brinell hardness.
Most likely you wont need anything special...just a good polishing compound.
Just make sure you use a flat backer for the emory cloth and not your fingers or you will get high and low spots and you will never get a consistant finsih.

[CNC Lurker]

At a previous company, we polished stainless steel, but not steel. We would take steel to a #4 finish, which is basically a fine-grained finish, nut never polished it to a #8 finish, which is basically a mirror finish.

For polishing stainless to a mirror finish, I believe we used aluminum oxide sanding material. As Perfect Circle stated above, we would also do each finer grit perpendicular to the previous one to make sure we got all the grain marks off.

After we took it to the finest grit we had, we used a 3M brand 7S light deburring wheel such as this 7S Light deburring wheel

We would follow the 7S with a buffing wheel and buffing compounds, starting with a gray rouge, then white, and last finish with green.

This procedure would probably work with steel also.

We got our buffing and polishing material from Buff, Polish, & Grind, Argyle TX LINK

They might recommend the best procedure, and that will depend on what equipment you have (stationary or hand-held).