Originally Posted by
Pro Stock
anyone ever seen an unfinished aluminum or Titanium polished frame?
Sure, plenty. Expensive, and shows scratches, and both Ti and alu oxidize and get dull after awhile. So, not popular.
One place I worked offered full polish as an option for our custom Ti frames, but hardly anyone took us up on it after learning the pros and cons.
One of the prettiest frames I ever saw was Gary Helfrich's Arctos, that he took to Interbike to advertise his Ti framebuilding classes. He'd smoothed all the welds down to the most perfect fillets you ever saw, and polished the whole frame to a mirror. It looked like liquid mercury made solid somehow. Tapered stays (super rare in Ti up until then), perfectly blended into the dropouts. And it weighed 1.0 kg. It sure worked on me, because I did sign up for his class, maybe '92? Listmember
Doug Fattic also took the class, a year before me. Gary taught us his system for smoothing the welds and polishing, so I know how labor-intensive it is. Stems are do-able, but polishing a whole frame is just crazy.
It's easier in alu due to being softer, less grunt work to get down below the scratches. I've seen some Cannondales and some BMXers that were polished, usually not to perfection because that last 5% to get to perfect is more work than the first 95%, so a sensible person stops when it's "good enough". The negative is that alu oxidizes and gets dull faster, so unless you re-polish periodically, you get less benefit from all that hard work. Al alloy is not nearly as corrosion-resistant as Ti, so without protection of some kind, alu eventually turns to dust, some alloys faster than others. So anodizing or paint are a must for alu frames if you want a lifetime frame.
Ti does not corrode away like alu. It gets a tightly-adhering oxide layer that prevents further oxidation, so after an initial period of getting duller (after polishing), it reaches an equilibrium and the look doesn't change much after that. But that look is a bit dull, disappointing to some customers who paid all that extra for polishing. So, bang for buck, a scotchbrite finish is much cheaper, and looks decent long-term. Media blasting is even cheaper but it's no one's favorite, looks ugly when new and even worse when it gets dirty. Grime gets down in the pits from blasting and stays there, hard to get it ever looking clean again.
Some people clear-coat over polished frames but that gets into a whole 'nuther set of problems like yellowing, scratched or flaking paint that looks like crap after a couple years, or corrosion spreading under the paint where you can see it but can't do anything about it.
That's all the long way of saying "there's good reasons you don't see polished frames very often".