Refurbishing Side Moldings 72 Chevy

[BruthaMan]

I'm currently working on this with my '72. The best way to get the anodizing off is using oven cleaner. I tried all sorts of things, including a buffing wheel with heavy grit polish, sanding by hand, wet sanding. The oven cleaner takes it off. Sprayed it very heavily.

I have a compressor and die grinder. Locally, could not find any sanding discs for the 3" die grinder above 220 grit. I searched online and came across this site:

http://www.onlineindustrialsupply.com/3solid.html

I ordered a box of 600, 800, 1000, 1200 and 1500 grit sanding discs. Before getting these, I was taking 800 grit sheets and cutting out circles then super gluing them to a sanding disc. The 800 grit worked well to smooth out the trim from the oven cleaner, but the sand paper would tear pretty quickly and it was a PITA to keep manually cutting out circles of sand paper and gluing them. I did more so to test how it would work.

A good buffer/grinder setup with a course wheel and polishing compound will easily take out 800 grit sanding and polish up nice.

We're going to start up on the process again tomorrow (Friday). It's been a low priority, but weather will be cooler (I'm not a big fan of hot weather) this weekend. If I can find my camera, I'll take some before/after pics.

Once we finish up polishing, we're going to tape off to paint the center section black, then follow up with a clear coat over each piece.