Stainless Steel Polishing

Hey all,
I have been struggling to find a good way of polishing my stainless steel 50 lt keg. I purchased it from Keg King, brand new. I was going to get it electroplated but the cost and logistics is very high. I have tried all sorts of sprays, buffers, polishers etc and while I am getting closer, I just can't seem to get to the finished product. Would someone give me some advice on a good way of doing this?

Best Answers

  • edited August 2014 Answer ✓

    Polishing Stainless Steel to a Mirror Finish @ finishing.com

    Try reading this. It involves a lot of wet sanding and multiple polishing compounds.

  • edited August 2014 Answer ✓

    Nearly impossible to do by hand, you are going to need power tools, and you are going to need to use polishing discs and abrasives that intended for harder materials, they make specific abrasives and pads for stainless polishing.

    You are going to need to do the process over multiple times, each times with increasingly finer grits. It won't be cheap or easy. If you don't have the power tools and pads, it's going to be a pretty good investment

    You'll probably end up somewhere around 1000 grit before it even comes close to looking like it's mirror polished. You would have polished it at least 4-5 times using progressively finer grit before you even got to 1000.

    There are a couple of keg polishing videos over on youtube that show some guys getting decent results from using just an angle grinder and a series of pads, rouges, etc.

    Just playing around over the years, I've found it very hard to polish stainless with a strong grain structure, that was way before I even knew what 304 or 316 was.

  • edited August 2014 Answer ✓

    Polishing a stainless steel beer keg for home brewing @ The Polish Guy

    Google brings up a stack of hits, As Grim said, there's some on youtube.

  • Don't polish it, insulate it. It will almost halve your warmup times.

  • Best advice yet.

  • rossco has given the best advice. The amount of work that is needed to mirror polish steel is huge. First you need all your sanding grits to really knock down the grain of your SS. Then once you have done that then you need all you polishing gear and different polishing compounds to really get it to shine. An you wont get it done by hand you need power tools to do it. How ever if you chose to polish your keg remember that your keg has a grain like wood and you need to work with it. The grain will flow around the keg not up and down it will save a lot of time working it the right way.

  • there is a place near me that does electropolishing of stainless, several vats you could put a pool table sized object in, they have acid of some sort and electricity of some sort, they put in racks and racks of large T-Bolts for huge sign posts, bridges, etc.. a friend has a shop next door to them, took me over there one day... they go in black and rough(from being forged, I assume), come out shiny and smooth... they said it only works on stainless... been talking about sending a boil kettle to them.... they said about $60 I think... just have not gotten around to it...

  • edited August 2014 Answer ✓

    "polishing your keg" is more than a clever euphemism @ HomeBrewTalk.com

    Seems like way too much work to me. I completely agree, insulate it.

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