Once you go down the road of polishing off clear coat, you'll be able to polish it to a mirror shine with grey buffing rouge and buffing wheel. But be warned, having been there with a 72 Triumph, IMO that is a long uphill road. Upkeep is a PITA and VERY time consuming on at least a semi-weekly basis, depending on environment. Way cheaper in the long run to buy chrome or have your stuff sent to Brown's or somewhere to be chromed.

 

Could try this. I have used the aluminun polish and it is awsome. Look around the web site they show how to remove clear coat...with their stuff

http://www.buschshineproducts.com/su...olish-p-3.html

 

One thing to be cautious of: With cast aluminum parts, the metal is more porous the farther away from the outside surface you get. IOW, the more material you sand or polish off, the more porous of a surface you are exposing. If you start seeing little pits in the surface, don’t try and polish them out, you’ll just expose more pits, and on and on…

 

The polished alum. I had on my 02 didn't have any clearcoat on them. I used Mother's Aluminum and Magnesium polish with lots of elbow grease. I then used a product from Starbrite, in a blue plastic bottle, Aluminum boat polish. Really resistant to water spots and excellent on chrome.

 

Start by waiting until you can remove the parts from the bike. Not only will the job be easier and look better when you're done, you won't get whatever polishing compound you use (I like Semichrome m'self) all over the rest of the bike around and near whatever it is that you are polishing . . . which is a real PIA to get cleaned up. Just doing maintenance or a touch up? Leaving the parts on the bike is OK . . . otherwise . . . save yourself a lot of time and major headaches!

 

The best and easiest way to do it is to have the parts off the bike. Rizzo posted a great how to (linked in his post here). After you are finished polishing, you can protect it and save yourself some touch up polishing using Eastwood's metal protect or Sharkhide.

 

cut and paste was not my friend - nevermind.