"Swift Method" Polishing
 

Has anyone ever used the "Swift Method" to polish aluminum. I helped polish a Confederate Airforce plane using this method. I found the air powered Cyclo polisher we used not too hard to use. It was still alot of work!

Swift Polishing Link

FlakMan, my intension has been to follow the swift method and I have the polisher and the nuvite compounds. That said, with my current project, I belive it will be for final polishing only. The body from Kirkham has been filed and sanded, so the swift method will come after I have fully sanded smooth and course buff/polished the car. At that point the swift method should work nicely for final finish (I'll let you know over the next month or two how that works out).

It's a heck of a lot of work to sand the body from 220 to 800-1200 then it only slightly gets easier. What I found is that after using a random orbital sander that it leaves a lot of little marks in the metal and they don't tend to expose themselves until you're at a really fine grit paper or you've started polishing, so you'll spend a lot of time chasing the little defects. After you get done sanding for the 10th time %/, taking a regular buffing pad to the project didn't seem to move enough metal to get rid of the very small blemishes, so I switched to a high speed grinder with an 8" sisal wheel and appropriate compounds to really blend and pull out the shine (careful to move quickly with a high speed unit as you'll generate heat really fast). All the sanding and the sisal wheel is getting me to the point where I think the swift method will come in to play. In other words, there is a tremendous amount of work to get to the point where it's useful and there's a lot of work left for final finish (the swift method).

The P51 Mustang we polished - hurt your eyes in the sun. Hope your fine machine has as much impact as that project did!

Brent,

Your car is way cool? I am about to polish my new car and I could sure use any ideas you guys have come up with to make it easier.

David :):):)