Steps to polishing your car rims

Last post showed you the tools to polish your wheels, here are the steps taken to do the polishing job.

First strip the paint using an Automotive paint stripper. I found one at the local canadian tire, but many say walmart carries it as well.

With the paint stripper, read as directed, however general guidelines are to spray the wheel in a shaded area and let the product sit for 20 minutes or until bubbling occurs. Once it bubbles, you can pressure wash the paint off. Note: this can get quite dirty doing this part!

After you have stripped the paint to your satisfaction, or until it wont come off anymore, I went on to sanding the rims and my curb rash. Basically, how I sanded was I used something like this:



Then when I was content, I got to using a finer sandpaper. I sanded the rim by using a mixture of water and a liquid metal polisher purchased from canadian tire to be used on aluminum. With the water based mixture, I kept dipping and sanding by hand the wheel with each of the finer grits until the swirl marks were not visible. Once sanding was complete, let the rim dry and clean the rim to ensure no dust remains.

I started with the black emery compound, moved to the brown compound and finished with the white polishing compound.

The steps you take are basically rub the black compound into the wheel that looks like a rope with a rough shape (attached to your drill). Cover the wheel with the black compound, and go over the dry surface with the wheel covered in black compound. Cover the entire wheel and when complete wipe off excess residue with a clean rag. You don't want the compounds to stay on the rim and mix with the next compound.

I then went to the brown compound, using the same steps as the black compound but with the lighter wheel in the kit. Polish all areas of the wheel with this compound.

After complete, clean the rim and apply the white compound by hand or the provided tools. I did the face of the rim by the tools, and the hard to reach areas by hand.

Note, the higher RPM your drill can go, the better the polished rim will look.

Congratulations, you probably are cursing starting the project as it's taken so long, but you should have a nice shiny wheel in the end.

I will have pics up soon of the finished product of my newly polished wheel.

Regards, MK
Learn about Car Detailing in my other blog!