I like treadmill tread for way covers. Extremely resilient, and free.
I get that it will be a lot of work, but if I'm going to clean this lathe up and make it look pretty, painting it and such, then I'm going to want to go all the way. I've looked at sending it out to be ground. The shipping would be hundreds, and the work would be thousands. I'm a hobbyist and I only paid $600 for the lathe, so that ain't happening. Spending time on it is part of the hobby. Money. . . look guys, she'll only let me have so much!
But, I don't get the immediate jump to "a dremel will ruin the late." Scraping is the process of determining the high spots, whether bluing with a straight edge, an optical flat or some other method, and then scratching them off. The question that needs to be answered to determine if an alternate to the hand scraper would "ruin" the piece is, "How much does each "scrape" remove from the work item?". If the alternate method is less aggressive, then one would be more likely to ruin it with the standard method. A dremel is a fairly weak tool. I can't see it eating through through metal as fast as even a hand scraper would.
But, I think I'm ready to stop talking about it and put a pre-project on the ToDo list. Get a set of I-beams from my uncle, and then hand scrape them into a set of straight edges. Nothing but time involved, and if it works, I'll have a story to tell.