Wheel Clean up

My reeems came out pretty good, so I thought I'd do a how to on cleaning old rusted wheels.
It would probably work pretty good on steel rims like old rockets or supremes, so don't fear, pick that shit up :D
Most of it is common sense, so bear with me, you might just pick up a pointer or two. Or maybe somebody has something to add.
Maybe I can get James G. to edit the beginning of this thread to go straight to the How To. LOL.

I picked all this stuff up at Home Depot.

What you will need:

2 spiral brushes
1 nylon
1 steel
3 brushes with the cool little tips (you'll see)
1 nylon
1 brass
1 steel
1 Scrubbie pad
1 Squirt bottle with diluted muratic accid
dilute 50/50 with water
2 Rubber gloves
1 Bottle of chrome polish
Baby diapers (rags)


Here's the grime/rust we are dealing with.




Squirt it down with the acid, and scrub it with the steel brushes. Get into all the nooks and crannies. It's amazing how good the acid works! The stuff just falls off. It seems to me the wire brushes don't scratch the chrome, but the rough side of scrubbie does. I used the scrubbie on the backside of the rim.








At this point squirt it down with more acid, check for spots you missed, then rinse off with water. Almost done!




I read somewhere on the net about how you should neutralize the acid with a base when using acid to clean rust. It said that the acid would cause the part to flash rust quickly afterward. I did notice this happening, but upon hitting it with polish it stopped. This was good enough for me, but if worried about it, you could simply mix some baking soda up with water, and give it another wash.

Next, scrub the wheel down one more time with polish. I applied polish to the brushes to get in all the hard to reach places. Go pretty liberal with it, and don't worry about buffing it at this point. Polish is just a fine abrasive so just try to re-scrub all the hard to reach places and get all the grime off of it. Then just let it sit for a bit and haze up.




Now to buff. I wrapped the diaper around the brushes, the bristles hold it pretty good. Makes for a nice little tool to hit all those hard to reach places. Start flossing.






Once that's all cleaned up, take the steel wool and give it a once over. There were a couple of spots I couldn't reach with brushes, so I got 'em with wool.


Give it a once over with a clean diaper, and that's it!



Thanks to FuManchu for this!