Nearly every time that I've painted a clutch cover, Ive had to fill a nic, deep scrape, or dent with JBweld, then the usual sanding. If your polishing, what would you use to fill those that wont rear its ugly head and just blend right in? Electrical solder? Skillfull melting with a small crackpipe torch? Make the wheel burn it away?
How do you get between the lettering without burning the lettering away?
With my skillset for polishing, I'd have to start out with a brand new cover.lol
That's what makes metalfinishing a skilled-labor-intensive process. You ought to try doing your own prep for chrome...talk about humbling(!):30: Every little flaw not only shows up, it's magnified. With chrome, however, you can use copper, welding, brazing rod, or copper to fill pits & scratches. When dealing with polished metal, not plated, welding is usually a remote and impractical possibility. With thin material, such as steel, stainless, copper, certain aluminum alloys, it's possible to dolly-out most of the imperfections. Then, it's time to level-out the surface with progressively finer abrasives (a.k.a. metalfinishing) then polishing. With castings, it's sanding, followed by more sanding, until you either achieve a uniform surface, or decide to live with a few flaws.
Different alloys have to be worked differently, I can't really break it down further than that. There is a certain amount of trial and error, until you get at least some experience with a specific alloy. Some aluminum alloys are downright temperamental when it comes to polishing. Honda engine castings are hard and on the brittle side. If you get galling, time to try a different combination of compound, wheel type & speed. Polishing a clutch cover is a helluva lot of work. Retaining the lettering slows the process even further; that's why most of polished specimens you see lack the lettering...it's far easier to just sand it smooth and go from there. Sometimes, that's where the men are separated from the boys...unless it's a cover that just didn't have the lettering in the first place, or the letters were damaged. How to work around them...slowly, using wheel compounds and a series of small/thin wheels. Sometimes, it's impractical to get every little recess and you'll just have to live with a certain amount of "less-than-perfect"...or spend days sanding between individual characters.
Don't kid yourself, even a new clutch cover can take 4-8 hours to transform into mirror-like "perfection". I polished the billet triple trees on my daily rider, turned `em into mirrors, literally. Best I've ever been able to do is 2-3 hours PER SIDE. That's starting with new parts, finely CNC machined and surface imperfections no more than a few thousandths of an inch deep. Want motivation to limit your polishing projects...or really dive into the deep end of polishing, try a CT70 wheel hub. Those tight-radius, concave, recesses will put one to the test.
No joke, polishing is more of a skilled craft, and painstaking work than most realize. IMO for most guys, brake plates and the occasional folding bar clamp/triple tree, or points inspection cover are sufficiently challenging...and satisfying, once done and luckily all the polishing needed on a stocker.