Bob - Thanks. Great minds think alike. I like having a glove compartment (I put one in my coupe) and I may steal your idea...

Roger - I have also heard of the dowel rod & valve lapping compound and I have seen some absolutely beautiful examples of the finished product, but I have never tried it. It must take forever to finish a panel that way. I came up with this wire brush and straight-edge process back in 1975 when I was building Quarter Midgets for my nephews and I used it again on the firewall of my C-Cab hotrod in '76. Using this method, once I get a rythm going, I achieve brushed dots or circles at the rate of about one per second. I soon found out that greasy fingerprints are almost impossible to remove from the raw aluminum surface, hence the clearcoat that I use now.

NTFDAY - Yes, I agree that a drill press could / would produce more consistency, but it would require building some kind of fixture to hold the workpiece and move it accurately in a straight line. Also, the depth of the throat on a drill press would limit the size of the workpiece which would have been a problem on my firewall (see page 27).