I suggest you get a piece of scrap stainless steel and sand it with 1000 grit and try to hand polish it because I highly doubt you will be able to hand polish it. Stainless steel is extremely hard and only machine tools will be able to polish 1000 grit sand scratches. Try it and let us know your results but I'd hate to see you create more work than is necessary. Here's a scrap piece I have that I simply buffed without any sanding at all... perhaps that's all you need to do too? Just try buffing it?
