Thought I'd show how the wheels hold up after polishing them a good while ago. These were done using the long hard method, ie. multiple grits and about 6 hours per wheel. It only cost about $50 and a couple of days to do all 4. But I'm still happy with the way the look.

They will get spots on them sometimes, but thats nothing that the Mothers wont take care of. And I've let them go for a couple of months inbetween touch ups, and they always shine back up.

So, what do ya think? Any ?'s. Does anyone else have some wheels they would like to show that have been polished for a while. Let me see.

 

Excuse the cam.

 

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nice

 

Horribly Dirty car + nice clean polished rims = priceless

 

LOL, you can see how bad the rims got at times. But to make you feel better, I just washed it about an hour ago.

 

the rims shine real nice but seem to be a little rough, not smooth. can you fix that or is that unfixable?

 

wow those look beautiful. can u give a detailed description of the steps u used to sand them and how you "polish" them with the mothers compound.

 

Thats just the Cam, they are really smooth, unless you mean some of the curb rash, then ya.

There are some old threads on this, but its like this: Remove clearcoat (sand it off, or the Aircraft Stripper, personally I would rather sand it of with some sort of power sander or a DA, its alot less messy).
Then I used a Mouse sander to do all the coarse grits up to 240. The rest was done by hand with a sanding block. Thats 400 to 2000 wet sanding. They sould look pretty damn shiny by this point if you take your time and put in some elbow grease on the lower grits. It really pays off when you take the Alum. polish and a high speed buffer and go to town, they look really good after that.

Other than keeping them somewhat clean and a 5 min. touch up every now and then, thats ally you have to do. Oh, and getting the machining grooves all the way sanded out is a really critical part to making them look good in the end. So buy a couple cases of Soda, haha, and grab a few buddies and you can have some shiny wheels by Monday.

Thanx for the comps.

 

what do you use to keep them up and protect them as well? i was told liquid carnuba is good to protect but i have yet to find anything that can keep the polish up by hand.

 

The only thing I do to them is buff them every once in a while with the alum. polish. Thats maybe once every 2-3 mos. After a car wash or something, I'll use a 100% cotton rag and some window cleaner to get rid of grime and dirt. One thing, never use one of the carwash scrub brushes (or any scrub brush for that matter) to clean the wheels off, they will leave horrible scratches in the finish.

I was thinking of getting some of that Zoop Seal, has anyone heard of it? I've seen it advertised in Mags and TV shows. Its supposed to seal polished aluminum parts and prevent them from fading and spotting so easy. And its supposed to last for a year inbetween applications.

The wheels might be harder to keep up being polished, but they look a thousand times better than if they werent.