Polishing Stock Wheels
 

Does anyone have an experience or suggestions on how to polish the stock wheels?

Are you looking to do the whole wheel or just the wheel lip?
IMHO just doing the lip is sufficient.
Bought some industrial strength paint stripper (marine/airplane I think...) and taped off the inner part of wheel.
Applied paint stripper in sections and after 10-20 minutes the paint would just bubble up and peel right off leaving a polished wheel,no wetsanding/buffing required.
Took about 13 hours to do both wheels but was definitley worth the effort
Heres a pic I took the day I finished both wheels (Holy crap 5 yrs ago!)


http://i157.photobucket.com/albums/t...20F4i/cbrs.jpg

Hondajunkie those rims look unreal from paint thinner alone!

I need to do something like this. I had a buddy help me mount my tires for free. But his equipment chewed up the lip of the rim pretty good in a few places and took more than just the paint off :icon_no:. i was thinking just to dremel the entire lip to give a nice polish. What brand a paint thinner did you use? i live 2 minutes from a Home Depot hopefully they carry it.

alooooooooooooooooot of work but pays off when its said and done.... use paint thinner as described.... then use a light grit sand paper and 0000 steel wool..... after a while with that use mothers aluminum polish... itll shine like crazy..... ide be willing to do it for you if you were to ship them here and pay $150 bucks.... (thats cheap considering its very labor intensive) i just got done polished the valve cover using this technique (minus the paint thinner i have a buddy that has a sand blaster so i used that) buy anyway i can post some pics of the valve cover off my 87 Conquest TSI turbo if u want to see the finished product

be carefull with that dremmel tool.... good chance of putting deep scrapes in ur rim what would be extremely hard to remove (depending on the grip of course) ......

ZMDS18,

Did you take the tires off of the rim to polish the lips or did you just tape them off?

defiinately take off the wheel... depending on the grade of paint thinner, it can eat away at the wheel

My buddies crappy tire iron already did a good job at eating away the rim.

Most paint thinners should, ("should" being a key word here), be safe on aluminum rims.

That looks awesome! 13 hours though, idk about that lol

Crap I cant remember what brand it was....just look for an industrial style of paint stripper and that should be sufficient. I used Mothers aluminum polish on the exposed rim aft er removing the paint,but really didnt have to.....i looked friggin perfect already!
The only downside to taking the paint off is that U have to keep the rims clean and dry otherwise they'll fade & pit.

Let us know if you decide to do it.. I can walk you through it :)