I agree with Stanton. There is an investment in setting up a polishing bench machine, a stand, pads, compounds, sandpaper, etc. I also use leather gloves a shop apron and a face shield. It is do-able yourself (I’m an obvious example) but it is tedious, takes a bit of a perfectionist approach and intense concentration when machine compounding and polishing parts. After I’ve spent an hour of polishing I’m worn out from the intense concentration, maintaining a death grip on the pieces, concentrating constantly on feeding them into the buffer such that it doesn’t catch, get ripped out of my hands and flung at me or across the drive, and my neck is sore from maintaining all this concentration while standing over the buffer. Any dings that need repair are doable in most cases but take a lot of care in massaging the stiff stainless steel out with a pattern of careful taps with a sharp drift, filing, coarse sanding, more taps, more filing, more sanding, etc and then final block sanding with increasingly finer grits until you are down to the compounding stage. It is rewarding to do it yourself but you need to sort of have a perfectionist touch and be ever-mindful of safety when working around that 8000 rpm or whatever buffing wheel.
