Cleaning Heatsink Surface?

[Bigbro]

I was cleaning the surface of my Alpha PAL6035 with a jewelers cloth to remove some residue. I noticed afterwards it left a lot of little scratches in the surface. Will this effect performance? If so, any recommendations on what drastic measures I have to take to get it back to a smooth finish. You know though it was not mirror smooth to begin with, the copper plate initially has these little curved concentric lines running through it.
One more thing, I read that thermal compound will react after a time with copper. Anybody know anything about this in regard to regular zinc oxide or Artic Silver II.
Thanks for any feed back in either regard. -ML

 

[amdskip]

You probably wanna use some sand paper on that heatsink very carefully and don't get any oil from ur fingers on it because this hurts performance also.