Paul M wrote:... I now have a large brass Farlow salmon reel in the process. It has already been cleaned and will be heavily but carefully polished because someone scoured / heavily scratched the side plates making it hard for me to look at. ( Maybe a fisherman dragged it in gravel/sand when salmon fishing but it looks more like an intentional defacing or poor attempt to clean the brass.)...
BEFORE : Both faceplate and backplate suffered from extreme scratches. Whoever did that should be shot!
The inside of the reel contained century old grease and grime but mechanically it is perfect:
AFTER:
It is very difficult to casually capture an image of the cleaned and polished reel due to the excessively shiny mirror-like surface, thus the weird camera angles. I wanted to leave the inscription as deep as possible. So while very polished looking, I had to limit my effort leaving some fairly obvious scratches. Anyway I can live with it now and will wait for it to re-oxidize a bit. The inscription looks much better than the picture implies. Works perfect with loud click and would make for a spectacular reel on a #10 (or larger) two-handed spey rod.