We've done a ton of research here on the forums as well taken the advice from many members and decided to get down to it and see what our girl will look like after she's polished out. We know that we have a lot of work to do (in general) on our AS but obviously polishing is a big-ticket item so we wanted to polish a section to get some motivation....
We purchased the AS kit from Jestco and followed the process. We started with the Gray Compound Bar and did 2 passes on our section. We then moved onto the Pink Bar (Red Jewelers Rouge) and went over the section with our polisher. Attached is a picture of our results so far.
As we are working through this we have had several questions. The first question is how much of the bars should we be adding to the buff each time we add it? We have spent about 2 hours on this section and it still is extremely hazy and looks nothing like the mirror finish we see other AS'ers are getting.
Another question we have is what are the dull gray areas on the surface of the panel (we've circled one in the picture attached). The picture doesn't show it well but it is really noticeable. We have tried buffing it out but it's stubborn as anything! We're not sure what it looks like under the Alcad but we're hoping we didn't burn through it! We don't want to do any damage.
We are documenting our restoration and want to share it with everyone. Is there a specific thread area that we should include our process in?
For those interested, we've uploaded quite a few pictures which can be viewed here:
Justin and Mary Teague's Photos : Livin' the 'Stream | SmugMug. The pictures of me polishing are before we purchased the Jestco products. We'll upload more in the next couple days.
Thanks and we look forward to hearing from everyone!