Originally Posted by EpicSchwinn

It's steel so you could chemically strip the paint off but you're not going to get far polishing raw steel. If you want to make it somewhat shiny you could clear-coat it after it's been stripped.

Edit: Apparently, with about 50 hours of polishing, you can polish cromo steel. Some BMX guy did this w/ 50 hrs of polishing. Seeing as you're unemployed at the moment you could do this between interviews and applications...