What steps do you use to polish frets after leveling/crowning?

[stevenrosburg]

All:

I recently completed the neck jig I was working on and did a fret leveling and crowning. I used a Stew Mac diamond crowning file, so the remaining file marks are very fine score lines (no chatter). What do you guys do to get all the file marks out after crowning? Sandpaper, polishing paper, micro-mesh, buffer, or all of the above? Please share what grit and/or polishing/buffing compound and what order you use if you use a combination.

I used 3M flexible polishing papers starting at 400 grit and worked through the grits. I also tried a Micro-Mesh polishing stick and that did a nice job as well, but it still takes a significant amount of elbow grease to get all the scratch marks out. Is this what you guys do, or is there a faster approach to get the larger scratches out first before going to the fine detail stuff?

Thanks in advance for any tips!

-Steve

[Pierre-Antoine Roiron]

Maybe I can be of any help for those whom hands hurt : I use to sand with Micromesh (as a lot of people hear it seems), but it was too time consuming and my shoulder did not stand it very well though I'm not that old (32). I'm way faster with this method now : I use 150 and 300 grit diamond coated Stewmac files, then I go to 600 grit gold 3M sandpaper on my bare fingers, sanding along the strings' axis, not along the fret. In no time you get a nice satin look and it removes all the re-crowning marks. Then I use a little felt wheel on my Dremel with a fine metal polishing compound and get a very nice shine. Any cleaning is done with OOOO steel wool (no pressure, be gentle).