The Detailers Cafe
Exterior Detailing => Wheels, Tires and Wheel-Wells => Topic started by: Tdub on April 19, 2009, 04:28:04 PM
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How do you guys like maintain and polish aluminum wheels? Is there anything better than mothers? The particular wheels that I'm talking about are the American Racing Torque Thrust.
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I'll go ahead and get this out of the way... make sure they are raw aluminum before you do any polishing, atleast with a dedicated metal polish.
That said, raw aluminum is really touchy when it comes to strong chemicals. I was playing around with a couple different cleaners to see what would work on my wheels that took a beating this winter. While nothing cleaned them (they were that bad), CG's Sticky Gel and Surf City's Beyond steel didn't hurt them at all. I got irritated and decided to try something that I knew was a bad idea but figured it couldn't look any worse. I used Meg's Super Degreaser at 4:1. Not only did it not clean anything that the other two wheel cleaners didn't but it left awesome streaking all over the place where the SD ran down the wheel. Now before I got lazy and decided to leave my wheels on for the winter, they looked good and the only thing I did for upkeep was using whatever wash solution I had left from the rest of the vehicle. Once a week was enough to take care of any build up. For polish, there are a bunch of good ones. Adam's Metal Polish is awesome. I've had less than impressive results with English Custom Polishes but I need to play with them some more. Mother's Mag and Aluminum polish is good but I am not relaly a fan of pastes because I like to do them the lazy way and use a power ball of some sort. Heavy Metal makes 3 levels of metal polishes. The blue is all I have used and it worked great. Then there is Optimum Metal Polish as well which polishes and leaves protection behind. Obsessive Detail's Metal Rx is similar in that it also polishes and leaves protection behind. Someone here used it on their BBG grille and got very good results.
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Read through this thread... I think you'll pick up some great info...
http://www.thedetailerscafe.com/smf/index.php?topic=1023.msg9160#msg9160
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Any buffers or polishing machines that can be used on them other than a power ball? I have a guy that was asking me.....