I have no argument with your reasoning Auchen and thank you for the caution.

There is no visual evidence that I am scratching the chrome using the soap-loaded pads heavily wet with the liquid chrome polish. But unseen thinning of the chrome is certainly possible, even working gently as I am, so I'd never use this as a regular form of maintenance. To bring my rider (not collector) back from the dead however it still appears to me to be a reasonable approach.

I think the lack of the scratching I would typically see with steel wool (or an abrasive paste cleaner for that matter -- I have seen visual chrome abrading from overused of Simachrome -- once the de riguer method of polishing out discolored chrome pipes among motorcyclists) is because the pads are floating on the heavy polish and lubricated by the soap embedded in them. The effect, I theorize, is similar to the process when a motor is breaking in. The rings "float" on a thin layer of lubricant and do not actually tough the surface of the cylinder wall except -- and this is the crucial thing -- where imperfections in the metal surface expose them. And so I think it may be with my method.

My wife's bike had worse rust on the wheels than mine but the handlebar was in much better shape. After treating it with the above method her bars look near perfect. There are two areas of obvious scratching however -- not from where I polished them but on the contact points from the times the bike was turned over onto its bars for service all those many years ago.

-don