As promised earlier, here's a little trick I use to "refinish" ("touch-up" would be a more accurate term) stainless steel firearms. First, a couple of examples of how stainless steel is finished, or re-finished.
The S&W Model 60 has the standard brush finish, while the Ruger Redhawk has a custom bead-blasted finish. Bead-blasting is done the same as sand-blasting, except fine glass particles are used instead of a more aggressive abrasive. Not shown is a "mirror polish", which is done with powered cloth wheels loaded with grease bearing some abrasive powder like iron, tin, or aluminum oxide.
The factory "brush finish" is done, mostly by hand, using soft wire buffing wheels made of fine brass or aluminum bristles. These powered wheels can not only be very aggressive if you lack the proper touch, they could also launch your workpiece into undesired trajectories.
Aware of all those shortcomings, I hit on using ordinary plastic kitchen scouring pad to slowly perform the "brushing" function.
This pad may be tough on baked-on food, but it's quite mild on stainless steel. So you'll have to use a lot of elbow grease (and risk reactivating my carpal tunnel syndrome in my case), but you can't get into trouble in just an instant. It's taking me several hours to renew a good-looking brushed finish in areas where wear from a leather holster has polished the stainless steel bright, but it will get done. There is also a coarser 3M maroon plastic pad in the automotive department, used to scuff up painted surfaces so new paint will adhere. It might speed up my job a bit, so maybe I'll get one for $4.
And I finally got the .40S&W barrel for my Glock 33. While .357Sig can be pricey and hard to find at times, .40S&W is almost as common as dirt, if not exactly cheap. This way, a quick barrel switch lets me use either kind. Oddly, Glock magazines in .357 and .40 have tiny differences in areas around the feed lips, but the ammo couldn't tell the difference. But Glock keeps coming out with different engineering changes on magazine followers without bothering to explain to customers what it means, either.
The Glock Model 33 will soon be my full-time carry piece, so I took both barrels to the range just to verify how well things work. Bar-Sto works some kind of magic with barrels for Glocks and the Sig P229, with little of no fitting involved. I'm still working on getting the fir right for my Sip P239.
Don't read too much into the target results, but I finally remembered proper Glock trigger control when I was shooting the .357. Overall, the barrels, and my skills, are about equal for both calibers. Works for all social interactions I can foresee.
Next week, I hope to have initial results with Ruger #3.