I know I should have been more careful, but i tried a little bit of Dremel red jeweler's rouge type compound on the side plate of my stainless Model 64. I applied it with a Q-Tip and only rubbed it with a circular motion for about a minute, but now I've got dull swirls on that whole area that are sticking out like a sore thumb. What can I do to polish them back out? I've found a couple Youtube videos that recommend using Mothers Chrome & Mag Polish applied by hand with a soft cloth. Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

You can't polish large areas with a Dremel or a hand held polishing tool like a Q-tip..
The buffs are simply too small to get wide area coverage and an even surface.

To polish large areas you need large diameter polishing wheels.
Professionals use HARD, WIDE big diameter polishing wheels, not narrow soft muslin buffs.
Using the typical soft buffs are what ruins good guns by rounding off corners and edges, dishes out holes, and leaves waves and ripples in flats.

To clean up the damage, you may have to start over with fine Scotchbrite polishing pads.
Buy these at an auto supply house where they sell these for use in painting cars.
Buy the finer pads.

Use a fine pad to restore the original factory finish, then go to the finest pads to remove scratches left by the coarser pad.

Then if you want a bright polish finish, use a good metal polish like Mother's Mag and a soft cloth to bring the metal to a shine.
Note that without professional level machine polishing to remove the fine machine marks left by the factory you won't be able to get as fine a finish as a factory bright polish job.
You can get the finish shiny, but the fine machine marks will still be there where a factory polish will have removed them.

Anytime you swirl a finish, you have to use the next least aggressive compound compared to what caused the swirls, work it over with that, and keep moving up the ladder of finer, gentler compounds until you removed the original swirls and ideally matched the original finish.

Mothers Chrome & Mag is probably too gentle to cut and polish the swirls you've made.

You may also have a tough time matching the repaired area with the rest, unless you do the entire revolver.

Recommend getting a set of Norton sanding pads: green, maroon, gray and white -- most to least aggressive, respectively.

Buy Pads Green 0 (20) at Woodcraft

These are excellent stainless steel refinishing pads.

Start with gray and see if that smooths the swirls and returns the brushed lustre. If not, move to maroon and retry, and so on.

Whichever grade works, you'll then have to move back up the order pads to the finer grade ones; gray is considered the closest to factory brushed, though I'll usually have a pass with white.

None of the pads risks the mirror polished look.

If green doesn't begin the smoothing process, you're on to wet sandpaper. Same methods apply: always begin with the least aggressive approach and work from there.

The little bit of polishing I've done was with Mothers and an old cotton shirt. It doesn't take much and you can go as long as you want until it's a mirror. The barrel and frame are very easy to do while the cylinder is more time consuming but still takes a polishing after a while. There is no reason to use power tools unless you are just in that big of a hurry.

Keep a Dremel tool away from all firearms. No other single tool has caused more damage to firearms than a Dremel.

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H Richard
SWCA1967 SWHF244

I use only the simi chrome polish by hand only. Save the used simi chrome rags for the blued guns to polish them a little too. The simi chrome polish also cleans up the tarnished nickel and chrome finishes too.

I go very lightly on the blued guns it brightens up the old dull finish. I have also removed the slight pin pricking on the blued finishes too. On stainless guns you can pour it on and polish it or go lightly too. On the stainless and nickel finishes it will remove the tarnish from the body sweat with an in the pants holster.

Dremels are good for polishing feed ramps on auto pistols.