ok... so today i made up my mind that it was time for me to clean up my 10 year old american racing 5 star wheels that have been neglected by the former owner. i read up on as many places as i could find about how to polish up the aluminum and bought tripoli and white rouge. after buffing the wheel with a powerball and bluemagic to get a lot of the really rough stuffs off i then was going to begin to apply the tripoli but when i opened the package i found that it was a solid bar and when i put the buffing disk on my drill it wouldn't pick up any of the compound... the wite rouge was the same damn way.. should they be solid bars or should they be rather soft??? i'm not really sure what i'm doing with this stuff... any suggestions???

anybody know if american racing puts clear on their wheels??

they wheels look good after just the blue magic but in the sun you can see they are still kinda cloudy... small scratches and some shallow pitting action i guess.... maybe i should hit it with sand paper?

here is a pic of what i'm starting with:

i took this pic before i took the wheels off the car to work on them over the winter(and they look waay better than this after just the blue magic):

 

The bars are hard. Run the pad on the bar and apply some pressure. A little goes a long way.

 

yup the bars are hard, I thaught the same thing when i polished my wheels. but run that buffer over the bar with a little pressure, and you will notice a defference when you start polishing.

 

I too thought the same thing. "how the heck do I get this stuff on the pad?" ...a little pressure and some high speed RPMs will heat it up a little.

And a little does go a long way.

 

Those wheels look perfect, I don't get it, why are you polishing them?
I suppose it would make sense to take another picture here then, after the blue magic, then again after polishing.
I definately don't think you need sandpaper on those wheels. The polishing compound should be enough. (forget if that's the tripoli or the rouge..)

 

I had the same exact set on my 92 RS which is now Plasma-Sword's car. I got sick of them looking hazy one day and took each wheel off one at a time and fully cleaned it and hand polished it with mothers. They looked beautiful, for about a week. Im pretty sure yours dont have clearcoat as mine didnt. Do you have any pics of the whole car?

 

Sonix:

they are FAAAR from perfect.. the pic i posted i guess really does not show how bad they are.. i mean, they COULD be a LOT worse but i'm looking to get them back to the way they were when i first bought them 9 years ago.. i just took a quick pic with one wheel that i spent a few hours on yesterday and one centercap that i have not touched (the centercap is a better representation of how they really looked when i took the first pic i posted in this topic)

you can see the centercap that is sitting on the wheel looks really bad.. the wheel looks ok but you can see it still has some fine scratches and haze


92purplehaze:

you can see pics of the car and the story of it in this thread that i made:
https://www.thirdgen.org/forums/hist...after-9-a.html

thanks for all the input guys! i'm going to get some more buffing wheels for my drill and have at it this week.. i'll update with pics as i go so maybe we can help others with the same issue