Chuck's is the best suggestion!
Most products are not a whole lot better than what you tried. And the professional powder coating or anodizing will cost you more than $25.
But if you just want to have a project for the fun of it doing it yourself, I suggest:
1. Polishing it out bright to look like stainless.
2. Have it silver plated; cost me $20 locally for a brass grip frame.
3. Or try one of the good spray and bake on finishes you can do in the "wife's" oven (caution, this one has gotten guys in trouble!) See below:
Stripping, Polishing and refinishing alloy frames:
To remove all the old finish, Easy Off oven cleaner works best on the old anodizing finish and is the easiest. You have to buy the "dangerous" oven cleaner, the kind with lye. Don't settle for the fume/odor free kind, it doesn't work. You can cleanup with 600 or 800 grit paper.
You can sand off the anodizing but it is laborious because it's so hard. And it takes a lot more follow up sanding so you can lose a lot of metal and original dimensions. Start with 320 grit paper and a small flat sided sanding block, 1" by 2 " by 1/4" or something in that size range. Mine is a piece of aluminum. The critical thing is to keep flat surfaces flat!
Switch to a soft eraser sanding block for the curved areas; trigger guard and back straps. Get all the remaining black anodizing off, then progress to 600 grit to get all the 320 scratches out.
For final polish preparation, finish up with 1000 grit. Use 2000 grit paper and bring to a shine with a well used piece of 2000 grit paper.
If you are familiar with and have a buffing wheel, you can now use it on the curved surfaces with white rouge (for stainless steel). If not, use the eraser and well used piece of 2000 grit on the curved surfaces. Do not buff the flat surfaces or the edges and corners will round off and look like an amateur worked on it. Follow up with any metal polish like Brasso, Flitz or Semichrome if you want it real shiny.
But the newer alloy parts are powder coated. Naval Jelly rust remover should cut it or Jasco paint stripper. Then final sand with fine grit paper like 1000 or finer to remove the least amount of metal and maintain dimensions.
Ruger no longer anodizes the aluminum frames, they are powder coated. If you send to them a frame for refinish it will come back powder coated and look like new but will not look like the OM anodized finish.
The only type of anodizing that will hold up is Type III or hard anodizing. The process is not suitable for the home anodizing because it takes special equipment that would be far too expensive for the hobbyist to acquire. There are several companies that will do gun parts.
Here are two:
http://techplate.com/firearms.htm
http://www.usanodizing.com/services.htm
Norrell Moly-Resin:
Sprayed on and baked, is tough, shiny and matches the blued steel best.
Dupli-Color High heat 1200 degrees ceramic paint gives good results but dull like the original finish.
At about $6 a can it is a fairly good substitute for the specialty paints at $20 a can. One thing about the ceramic infused paints such as this and Wheeler Cerama-Coat is that they only require a clean surface for application, (Wheeler Cerama Coat instructions state: "Blued or Parkerized steel and anodized aluminum can be coated as is. However, if any red rust, corrosion, or oxidation is present, it must be removed in order to assure proper adhesion of Cerama-Coat and to protect the substrate from further deterioration. Light surface rust can be removed using fine steel wool and a penetrating oil or solvent. Severely corroded surfaces should be stripped using a chemical stripper and/or a mechanical means such as a bead or sand blaster, a buffing or sanding wheel, or by hand sanding.")
If you don't want to bake it those below are cheaper but mediocre choices.
Brownells Aluma Hyde II
DuraCoat
Gun Kote
Cerakote
BTW: Paints have varying degrees of resistance to the various chemicals found in cleaning/ lubricating products. It best to limit (or avoid) exposure time to them. It’s probably best to do a test piece and expose it to the products you use.
