Wheel polishing DIY

[nismike]

I thought I would share my work in progress on my wheel polishing. I like the OEM wheels,but I have always thought the silver paint looks kinda boring so I decided to spice things up a bit. Heres what I did.

The tray hepled contain some of the mess, and also protected the paint on the floor.



Here's after the first shot of aircraft remover.



The first couple of layers are gone with just the remover alone.



After a few more coats of stripper, this is as far as I can go without scraping. It looks like its down to the metal, but your seeing the really tough paint, none of it is lifted with the stripper. Theres a black layer, then a white layer under the silver.



All the paint is finally coming off with the scraper.



Heres just before I moved on to the sander. All of the metal has to be sanded. It actually has a texture that has to be removed before polishing.



I just used a palm sander with 120, then 220 grit. Do not use any type of dremel or drill sander.It will just eat into the metal.



This is as far as I went with the sanding. Ideally you would want to have all traces of the paint gone at this point.However, I was starting to run out of time so I went on to the buffing, which will also help remove some of the remaining paint.



Just work some polish into the pad and start buffing.



Heres when all the hard work starts to pay off, here's the first little bit of shine.



It dosent look like much right now, but its all been polished and ready for a good cleaning with dawn and a brush.



It's a lot of work, but well worth it.

(the spots are just water)

[Focusedintntions]

Awesome job my friend! How hard is it to keep them shiny like that?

[oldandslow]

WOW Im impressed by Your effort.You did a great job! I bet that took a week to do.I used to do that 40 years ago when I had more time than money.Now I just pay 40$ a wheel to have it done.

[biggie]

Wow a lot of hard work. Did you clear coat them after you were done?

I really need the 19s on mine.

[nismike]

Awesome job my friend! How hard is it to keep them shiny like that?

Thanks! I did the front one a while back and the back one the other day. it was no problem with the one wheel, I would spend about 10 minutes on it about every 2 weeks. It may be more of a pain when all 4 are done. Then it will be like 40 min of solid hand polishing. but i still don't think I will mind.

[nismike]

WOW Im impressed by Your effort.You did a great job! I bet that took a week to do.I used to do that 40 years ago when I had more time than money.Now I just pay 40$ a wheel to have it done.

thanks, I did one of the wheels in a day. I enjoy doing stuff like that, but If i could find someone who would do all of that work for 40.00, I woulda been all over that.

[nismike]

Wow a lot of hard work. Did you clear coat them after you were done?

I really need the 19s on mine.

Not sure if I'm gonna clear them at this point, if it gets to be too much to keep up with I will. The more their polished The better they look, and I would also be concerned about the clear flaking off and getting scratched after a while.

[pfarmer]

Wow a lot of hard work. Did you clear coat them after you were done?

I really need the 19s on mine.

I am not so sure that the scraper was really necessary as I have seen work on different parts done using ash in a sand blaster.

Perry