Well. today I finally got tired of the dull deteriorated look of the beads on my gold N-24 wheels and finally got out the sand paper and went to work on them. So far I've got one done very nice and what a hell of a difference it made on the wheel. I didn't use a drill powered buffer however just 180/400/600 grit followed by mothers. I could have probably made them like chrome using tripoli/white rouge etc. However I didn't want that kind of mirror shine on them. I went for the less brilliant shine since this is a two tone car and I thought it would clash. Took me about 2 hours for one wheel using a way I found on here just jacking the car up and running it in 5th gear idling. This method took off the nasty cloudy clear coat pretty quik, leaving a very nice shine to the aluminum after giving it a quik rubbing of mothers. Sorry for some reason I can't post pictures .... If someone can help me do it I will e-mail them to them.

Well, so far I've gotten 3 of them done ...... WORD OF CAUTION fill car up with gas before starting hahahaha I started at 1/4 tank and you would be amazed at how many miles you put on the car doing this ..... on the positive side the wheels look great, I actually got a far better shine then I even anticipated, would take very little effort to get a chrome like shine to them .... however this is the shiniest I want them. I will one way or another post some pictures after I touch up the gold a little bit .... before I take pictures need to wash the tires and rims since wetsanding left the wheels a real mess.

Tomorrow when I do the 4th rim I will take pictures of before during and after. The 4th rim was actually the nicer of the set when I put them on the car. I wish I had pictures of these rims when they were new so I could semi match the original shine they would have had.
Seems like 400 grit would probably get them close to it. 600 grit makes them actually pretty shiny without polish. Right now I have black center caps and the original gold bird decal turned to silver/chrom color these were cheap ebay caps not the originals, as shiny as the wheels are now some of those chrome plated center caps might look good.

Whatever that clear coat is that stuff is tough by the way. Wonder if it's actually a powder coat clear because it seems equally as strong as the gold factory stuff on my rims. I'm going to really detail the whole car this weekend and put up some new pictures of it inside/out, I'm going to look into using professional buffer and clay bars to really bring out the paint. The car is actually very shiny as it is so I figure this will really bring it out quite a bit.

i wanna see some pics, how fast do the wheels spin ?when in 5th gear idling?

about 20-25mph

I was also going to add when doing this it's a good idea to open your hood and if your car is like mine run the electric cooling fan all the time. I've probably spent about 25.00 bucks to completely do this.

Sun tan lotion is also a real good idea, heck you can get a nice tan and have shiny wheels at the same time.

This detail work would also be the perfect reason to go out and buy yourself a 4 cylinder camaro/firebird. They fail at everything else but would be great for this. But honestly if you have a V-8 expect to use half a tank of gas LOL. I think I added like 130 miles to my car doing this LOL maybe more on the 4th wheel I will see how many miles it accumulates. Just real hot outside right now and I'm not to enthused about going out there and finishing LOL.

Well, the 4th wheel is extremly stuborn. the clear on that one is much better then the other ones, I'm trying 80 grit on this one and it seems to be breaking the clear down easily. Even with the coarse 80 grit it leaves a better finish then the cloudy clear coat. I would think by stopping at 180 grit and clear coating you would have a very nice shine, I started getting a mirror type semi shine when I switched to 400/600 wet.

When I say mirror semi-shine a rough description is what guys do to TPI systems when they use that almost chrome powdercoat. I will try to post pictures tonight or tomorrow.

Okay here are the pictures before and after.

And here is them on the car. Made a huge difference now I just need to really detail the car inside and out and up for sale it goes. Once you get the hang of doing it polishing the bead area is easy, I probably should have started all the wheels with 80 grit it knocks down the clear coat and removes imperfections real good. Oh and this was my first time attempting to polish so it's not like it's hard. It's just real time consuming expect a full day to do it if your wheels were bad like mine.

Good start. Looks good Now work your way to the rest of the wheel. That will make a world of a dif. It doesn't take that long, and you don't have to be perfect if you intend to flip the car. That said, good prep and you're off. (just my 02)
-Andrew

Just wanted to update this. After a couple of months my wheel beads are still retaing there shine and I haven't done anything to them other then just wash them with soap and water really quik. So if you want to remove the ungodly ugly clearcoat this works great and maintains it's shine.