how do you restore your aluminum grille trim

Hi Y'all

How do you restore your aluminum grille trim? I have a nice set of grilles and headlight buckets i purchased from another fabo member. These are in good shape for 45 years, but they have a fair amount of sandblasting on them from debris the road kicks up. I have restored stainless trim for a 60 el camino before and understand about fixing the minor dings in these, by carefully tapping them out from behind, and flat filing to smooth em out.

However since the cuda grilles im working with are anodized it will remove the coating . Heres what i did on a small area. I started with 400 grit and sanded past the pitting in the aluminum, tgen i kept switching to finer and finer grits till i was using 2,000 wet sand grit. Then i polished the bare aluminum with a metal polish. It looks great super shiny and smooth, but now theres nothing to.protect the bare polished metal. Plus it took a fairly long time hand sanding about 3 inches of one piece of trim.

Are there other ways of doing this to make the grilles look new again besides how im trying to do it? Let me know what you do to repair and repolish your aluminum grille brightwork.

Thanks
Matt