Recently I have experimented with taking wet sanding to the next level. I put some Flitz liquid metal polish on 600 grit sandpaper. It works really well. The polish melts off the crud while the sandpaper scrubs it away. It also leaves far fewer swirl marks than sandpaper alone and leaves the piece nicely prepared for machine buffing.
I used this technique on my Hoover 102. The reason I used this here was to keep a dull finish but avoid scratch markes. It worked fairly well and left a smooth dull finish. I think machine buffing would go extremely quickly if I chose to go that route(which I don't).
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