Repairing and Straightening Stainless Trim

When starting a restoration project, you'll notice you have bright work on a vehicle that will be the stainless trim that's obviously around this 34 international grill shell but after 80 years of wear and tear, you'll notice you'll have dents, scratches and gouges throughout the piece. And in order to bring it back to its original luster from the factory, it's gonna require straightening, grinding, sanding, and polishing to bring it back. Now with the grill out of the way, we're gonna start with rough straightening of your stainless trim. We got this eyebrow piece for a 57 DeSoto clearly see that there's some damage in it, there's some also damage sticking out on the piece and another dent over here. I like to wear gloves just because stainless edges are usually pretty sharp like a razor, so you don't wanna cut yourself up while you're trying to straighten it. I like to use the a table as a dolly a lot of the time they do also offer specialty trim or jeweler's hammers is what they're sometimes called also trim ambles but in this case since it's a large flat piece I'm just gonna go ahead and use my standalone auto body hammer. You really wanna take your time here with this you don't wanna overstretch the metal or make more damage in the piece. Since this is such lightweight material it really doesn't take a lot of pressure to actually move the material. When you're straightening stainless the easiest way to tell if you've got the dent out is just by drawing a sight line across a piece of stainless when it looks straight, usually really close. But the final determination of if you've got the piece straight is when you start getting into the Sandy and filing of it. All right, so I just switched out the block on the bice for the center punch. also I'm trying to do is raised the little low spot I have so just applying gentle pressure to the piece and the desired area I could slowly bring up that low spot. Now with it at the desire straighten on after we're gonna start with using a single cut file to determine how straight the piece actually is. and if we do need to raise any lows or hammer down any highs that are still on the piece. As you can see we still have one small low spot over here so we're gonna bring that back up. Patience is key you only get one piece of trim to work with. Now that I'm satisfied with the rust straightening of the piece, we're gonna move on to final sanding and polishing of the piece. Now that we've roughly straightened the stainless trim we're gonna sand and smooth out all of our hammer and filing marks from a piece. Working with a relatively coarse grid this is 80 grid on a sandy block, just gonna work in a 30 degree slide and correspond on the other way 30 degrees for the piece, Now we're done with the 80 grit, your only goal at the sandy paper is not the grind material down a lot because the material is already so thin your only goal here is to smooth it up so you don't wanna see any further grinding scratches. I'm done with the 80, I'm gonna switch over to one 180 now and we're just going to slowly work our way down to 2000 grit before buffing. Older stainless steel usually has a higher nickel content, since this came off of 57 DeSoto, it's a little bit less car manufacturers in that time are always trying to cheapen the materials as much as they could. So sometimes you'll notice cars from the fifties actually have rust on it, It's due to the lack of nickel content in the actual material, but it's not to say that it can't be sanded and polished right back up Little bit finer grit, this is 400, satisfied with the removing all the 80 grit scratches with this 400, we're gonna take out all the 180 grit scratches. You'll notice that the grit with the 400 center it's so much finer tends to clog up and dole out a whole lot quicker, so be prepared to use a little more 400 grit to achieve your desired result. Now that I'm satisfied with smoothing it up with the 400 grit, all that I'm gonna do is take the Da some, 30, 20 grit a little bit rougher but I'm just going to even out all the sanding hatches or sanding marks that you see in the piece with the Da swirlers so when I move on to the wet sanding I will be able to see any of the coarse or grit scratches in the piece and focus my time by working those off. Now I haven't even finish, so I will be able to see any of the sandy and scratches left by the Da but now I'm gonna move on some 600 grit wider dry paper, I already stuck my paper pre-soaked it in the water there's a couple drops of soap in here to help clean the surface of the wet sanding paper from clogging. As the other reason for why your wet sanding is wet Sanding doesn't allow the material to clog the paper. Same as before 30 degrees slide cross hatch, as you're trying to work out those Da's swirl marks, your only goal here is to continue the smooth process but with this older trim I've discovered that you do need to take it all the way down to 2000 grit, sand and paper to get a nice polish out of it. So again, very time-consuming, but always worth the effort. Now that we've finished up with our 2000 grit before this we worked with 1500 grit, thousand grit and 800 grit, now all the Sandy and scratches and file marks are now out we're gonna move on the buffing. Just drying the surface here, When dealing with rotating objects or grinders you always wanna remember safety first, safety glasses, when it comes to buffing, I always liked to wear a respirator. Also gloves while you're buffing you're always building heat in the part so good thick pair of gloves, always a good choice. This is a buffing dresser, bunch of sharp teeth on it, this will clean the wheel from any other dirt debris that was on it from anything else you're buffing. And there's two different types of wheels, you got your rough cut, which will be spiral wound and you got your finished cut wheel, this is loose. This is what we're gonna use with the white Rouge. This we're gonna use with the Tripoli compound to make our rough cut on the stainless. Now that we're done with the initial coarse cut we're gonna move to the fine cut, We're gonna have to switch out the wheel for that. Now all we're doing is getting the last little bits of buffing compound off the piece, as you can see, we've only done one section of this but you can see the transformation from the beginning stages, rough out, filing this is the section of original and our newly brightened area that did have damage on it. All we're gonna do now is finish it all up and put it on the car.