As allot of you may already know, i bought a set of wheels from a fellow member, he polished the stainless lip on them but unfortunately he used a polish designed for chrome and aluminum. As a result the wheels had a haze to them and very fine scratches from the abrasives in the polish. As we all know stainless is a hard metal and most of the cleaning or polishing supplies do not work. The only true way to polish stainless is a three step process starting with a heavy grit polish and ending with the finest grit. It is a very messy and time consuming process and must be done with a very high speed buffer and using different polishing pads. And if not done properly can destroy a wheel due to overheating or taking too much out of the metal. I have over the years tried many different products to clean and polish stainless wheels and the best I have found is Mothers carnuba cleaner wax. It will not scratch and leaves a nice finish that makes removing brake dust a very easy job. I polished my wheels with the mothers and still had a haze and the very, very, very light scratches in the wheels. Rather than take the green compound and polisher to them i decided to try an old trick I learned years ago and bang it still works. For those of you that have very fines scratches in your rims try this. First make sure the rims are completely clean and use nothing but DAWN dish washing detergent and hot water. Then get them completely dry and take the softest cloth you can find ( micro fiber polishing cloth works well or an old 100% cotton t shirt) next take baby powder and apply to the rag liberally and run the rag around the rim with light pressure making sure to go in the direction of the rim. I know its messy but what you will find is that it will remove the haze and 99% of all the micro scratches from the steel. When finished I always blow as much of the powder as I can with an airgun. Then re-clean as described about and put a couple of coats of Mothers on them and your good to go. I hope this helps some of you in getting out those scratches that are annoying you. Good luck!
Old Trick New Results!
- Thread starter Renhalt
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