| Give about 3+ years of brake dust and road grime collection and only simple cleaning through the time and just about any set of wheels will begin to show their age. I dropped $3K into these babies back in the day and as of recently, have only looked marginally better than a new set of OEM wheels. Yesterday I washed the car and was focusing on trying to get some of the hard-to-reach grime out of the wheels; namely down into the lip at the center spoke section at each end of the spokes.. Nothing I tried would get it out: standard wheel cleaner, PurplePower Degreaser, Gunk Engine degreaser, Wesley's Tire cleaner (pretty harsh sodium metasilicate base), still no dice. So I tempted fate and took some of my etching mag wheel cleaner that I use for my Mazda PU's wheels, which I knew would be a bad idea. It contains a strong mix of acids, phosphoric, hydrofluoric, and sulphuric to be exact. When I spray this onto my PU's wheels, the aluminum foams all up with hydrogen bubbles as the cleaner etches the metal - makes for a very clean etched finish (satin-like). So I lightly sprayed a small area and took the brush to it. As I suspected it would, the garbage came right out of the metal and it also left the surface of the metal with a patchy finish of varying degrees of aluminum oxide. I guess I sealed the deal right there - I've wanted to do some sort of R&R to clean the wheels up but after doing this to one wheel and basically ruining the finish, it was time to bite the bullet. You can sortof see what happened to the wheel after cleaning it with the acid: the wheel is clean, but you can see a haze and blotches of oxidation in the lip: 
Here's a rear wheel still on the car before cleaning or R&R. The brake dust is hiding a lot of the old finish.
 The nice thing about 3-piece wheels: they come apart easily. I removed the center spoke hub and began wet-sanding the lip with 600-grit paper. After cleaning up the surface and working out a few scratches, I hit it once again with the etching wheel cleaner, mostly to clean up the brake dust/road grime from inner half of the wheel and rinsed her off. I then followed with a Makita 3000RPM buffer drive (looks like a drill) and some Mother's polish and brought her to this instant kind of shine: 
I further hand polished the lip to get a brighter shine and reassembled the wheel: (yes, a small ding in the lip near the top: courtesy of Louisiana Highways during the ZCON trip)
*Note: the etching wheel cleaner brought the inner lip to that clean of a finish in seconds with just a soft-bristled brush - no scrubbing necessary, it took all the brake dust and 95% of the grime off in a single pass: the etching cleaner works awesome on aluminum parts - just dont put it on polished aliuminum. :) 
I did the same routine on the other rear wheels: Here's the front driver's side:
 Final shot:
 I'm sure that the wheels are going to require more care than they did before. I found when sanding the first one that there is some sort of clearcoat on the lip. It definately isn't a polyurethane clear coat as I hit the wheel with some aircraft-grade paint remover and the clearcoat didn't even flinch. I think they may have had a clear powdercoat on them, which I will probably end up having reapplied to them in the near future when time permits. Does anyone here have experience with clear powdercoating? Woody? Anyhow, they look 10X better than they did and it wasn't terribly difficult work to do. Anyone else have experience with this that can add something, especially about clear finishes on bare, polished aluminum? TIA! Note: no alteration of images was done. They "bling" all on their own. =)
[ ashspecz.com ]
[ agpowers@bellsouth.net ] Enthusiasts soon understand each other. --W. Irving.
Are you an enthusiast? If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.
Albert Einstein
|
AshsZ-II Ultimate Street Z: Project: Blitz Bling. :-P - 
