How to polish aluminum bicycle parts – Sakae MTS-120 stem

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In this video I’m going to explain how to polish aluminium bicycle parts. And in this case we’re going to polish a Sakae MTS-120 stem from 1986. As is the bike, the stem is in pretty bad shape with deep scratches and nicks all over.

If you polish aluminium bicycle parts you have to take the necessary steps to achieve the ultimate result of a mirror-finish. Obviously a good cleaning is in order. After which you sand the aluminium in a number of steps. Each step involves an increase in the number that represents the sandpaper grit. The final step involves using a machine polisher and both a cutting- and polishing compound.

Tools used:
Machine polisher: https://www.hbm-machines.com/producten/polijsten/polijstmachines/hbm-150-mm-hobby-polijstmachine

I’ve also written about blog post with more information. If you want to read this article go to https://www.restoration.bike/bike-restoration/polish-aluminum-bicycle-parts

Visit my website for more bike restoration tutorials: https://www.restoration.bike/

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Music is from the YouTube Audio Library
Song is “Song of Sadhana” from Jesse Gallagher

Hello my name is joan from restoration.bike and in this video i’m going to show you how to polish aluminium bike parts the first thing we needed to do was to get it out now we seized shot which is usually the case with these old bikes but loosening the bolt in a gentle tab

With a a hammer on a piece of wood is usually enough and then next step and an obvious step also is to remove the rust before i will start with the sanding and polishing step basically any um polishing of aluminium bike parts involves sanding it first or

Rather cleaning it first as you can see here and then sanding it in various steps now what i found is that when you try to get that super shine that that mirror finish back um especially with with old and used parts they are damaged um so they have deep scratches and sometimes

Rather extensive damage as you can see here and the first step in the sanding process is to use a rather coarse grit and i use a 80 grit here and this step involves the most time because this coarse grit is used to get all of those scratches out

And here you can see how much effort it takes to get one of the nicks out um and it takes a long time this entire process involves like two to three hours so take your time and be patient uh from the 80 grit i move upwards to 150 grit

Then at 240 grit before i move into wet sanding so this is probably the first wet sanding step which is a 400 grit then i use a 600 grit and i end up using an 800 grit and then i turn over to my machine polisher i’m using a bit of coarse sandpaper to

Get the old cutting compound off the sand polisher has two wheels a coarse wheel which is this yellow one and uh one on the other side which is a white one this is used for cutting so basically it’s a you put on a piece of sandpaper on the wheel which is

Translate translate to a really uh really fine grid like up in the thousands to get uh the scratches that are still on there from the 800 grit sandpaper to get them out there are four polishing steps involved two for each wheel and you they correspond to various color codes

On the polishing material which you put on the wheel so basically it’s the same as sanding polishing polishing polishing polishing and then you get to that mirror finish take your time there’s no other way if you enjoyed the video please subscribe and drop a like if you have

Any questions or suggestions for new videos leave a comment below you can also visit the website restoration.bike for more background information wish you all the best with your own bike restorations and i hope to see you on the next video