So if its stainless steel do you need to do anything if its been abrasively polished? Everything I read about it says it gets rid of stuff after machining, but I got it to a very high shine presumably with nylon and some kind of oxide
Maybe soft barkeepers friend? It has oxalic and citric acid in it and it makes shiny stainless look good without scratching it (not the powder, its a liquid).
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Passivation is a post-fabrication process that is performed after grinding, welding, cutting and other machining operations that manipulate stainless steel. Under ideal conditions, stainless steel naturally resists corrosion, which might suggest that passivating would be unnecessary.
https://www.besttechnologyinc.com/passivation-systems/what-is-passivation/So it seems that if I abrasively cleaned the surface, it would benefit from some kind of passivation, if nylon abrasive brushes can be linked to grinding
https://www.besttechnologyinc.com/passivation-systems/citrisurf-citric-acid-passivation-solution/So I will try citric acid passivization with the ultrasonic as mentioned by the first article. I think what it whats is when you clean it you get the actual stainless steel mixture , but you really just want the chrome without the iron, so you wanna eat the iron away from the surface so you are left with a very thin layer of chrome that oxides like aluminum to protect it, so no matter how gentle the polishing is, you are changing the surface composition to be like the core.
Unless its like pure chrome or something? but it seems like a safe bet to try this, they are replacable anyway. \
I got the citrisafe passivization cleaner, I will try it on the parts that I made, maybe its the key for restoring soldering iron barrels which seem to tarnish way quicker then normal after polishing, perhaps it just needs an actual passivization processes rather then ;'it looks great why bother' .