There was not any visible rust and the surface wasn’t pitted in any way it was just plain ugly. The door escutcheon was seriously tarnished with a very rough surface. Wondering if you have the old version? The original Brasso formula was sold in metal containers and the new formula is sold in plastic containers. That being said, for this test, I used the new Brasso so we can test its current version.

I wasn’t a heavy user of Brasso before the formulation change, but the folks I talked to said it’s like night and day and sadly much less effective than the legacy product. The formula was changed in 2008 to comply with tightening VOC restrictions in the US, and despite which side of the issue you come down on, it hasn’t been the same since. Unfortunately, like many products from the old days Brasso is not the same formulation it used to be. One downside of Brasso is that it cannot be used on silver unlike Simichrome. It rose to popularity in the 1920s and was offered as a thick paste or a cloth impregnated with the compound. Brassoīrasso was invented in 1905 in Great Britain to polish metals of all sorts. That’s not to say it seals the metal completely, but rather assists in delaying the oxidation of the surface. Simichrome also leaves a thin, invisible, protective film on the metal surface to protect against further tarnish. Simichrome works well on chrome, silver, brass, gold, copper, pewter, aluminum, magnesium, stainless steel, and is even fine enough to work on Plexiglass. The wanted a fine polish for the chrome and other high polish metals for those amazing vintage automobiles. Simichrome Polish is a paste polish that was invented in Germany by the Happich company in the 1960s which made metal parts for luxury automobiles like BMW, Volkswagen, and Mercedes. After this post you should have a good sense of which one you may want because they do yield different results even if they proclaim to do essentially the same thing.

I decided to put them head to head on a piece of vintage hardware around my shop, an old door escutcheon, to see how they do and what the difference is. Both are of these polishes have been heavy hitters in the metal polishing world for years and are very flexible as to what metal they can polish. It’s a battle of the two biggest polishing compounds on the market.

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