I don't think you are going far enough with your sanding but i could be wrong. I work with aluminum bicycle parts and have prepped QR skewers for chroming, and have brush plated QR paddles and a few other items.
I got all the way to 1500 and 2000 grit sandpaper, wet-sanding under the faucet, then I get out the dremel at very high speed and very very low pressure and polish to a mirror finish with white rouge. On steel it is very very hard to do this. The reason is, when you screw up at step X, you usually don't know until step X+2, and so you waste lots of time with polishing compound X+1 and back to X+2 until you realize it aint gonna work and you have to backtrack to X. My items don't get any brighter when i plate them - in fact they get duller and i have to often re-polish and replate several times. I have not been very successful dip-plating items in my brush chroming solution.
Then i use nevr dull to hand polish to perfection. Some people have told me that simichrome may have some compounds that might be very difficult to remove prior to plating. I think nevr dull is not much more than some oil and acid, but i may be wrong about that.
- Don Gillies
San Diego, CA
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