Well everyone to make a long story short over the christmas break it iced here in Dallas and well my car is my daily driver so I had to drive in the sand/ice etc for 2 days straight...with that being said the following day I was heading out of town to my wife's parents house and I was going to be there through the New Year...roughly 2 1/2 weeks total. I parked my car at my rents house in the garage still covered in all the sand etc...well when I returned I was def missing my G and needed to go wash it so I headed to the car wash. After finishing washing the car I noticed little rust spots all over each one of my lips....I thought to myself well ****...I tried alot of different things before re-searching to try and get this crap off....Well after about 2 weeks of sunshine then rain etc...it actually was warm enough/sunny for at least the whole week I decided to really clean up the Car (today that is).

So After re-searching and speaking to members on the boards on how to clean this rust like/water spots off my rims to shine to perfection again I decided to show the products I used...nothing really expensive but household goods!!

Anyways enough chit-chat...I believe this probably works best for those up North members who have a daily driver and have to drive in ice/snow alot.

First off:

Here is what I was dealing with on my rims..you can see the little spots of rust/sand that has stained into the lip:




Products I used:



Typical Dawn Dish shop with some luke warm water and the products in the pics. I picked up the polish, microfiber, and SOS Pads from Autozone local.

First Step: Take the Steel wool cloth and Luke warm Water with Dawn Dish Soap and scrub around the Lip....Typically everything comes off in the first scrub. dont do a real hard scrub on it...Just nice and gentle.

In between shot..compairson..not to good though.



Second Step: once the rim is scrubbed take the microfiber cloth and wipe around the whole rim. Make sure to take off all of the Dish Soap.

Third step: apply the polishing compund/wipe to the lip or rim depending on what you have...

Once you have applied the Polish to it take a seperate microfiber cloth and wipe all of the polishing off the rim and you should be complete. If you still see some residue after wiping the down the first application of the steel wool and dawn you can repeat the process as needed. If you have any questions let me know.

After the cleaning:






Mounted back up!

 

Man those pics are huge... Looks much better tho

 

Resized the pics back up. sorry about that....had photobucket uploading 24" monitor shots..lol!!!

 

Which steel wool grade did you use? I see the bag says coarse, medium, and fine grades in it.

 

thats a good question!!! lol I just pulled out the first one at the top of the bag..I would have to compare and see...I would think the one I used though was "fine".

 

Im gonna have to give this a try. I got some hard water spots and some rust spots as well.

 

alright man let me know how everything comes out.

 

Thanks for the write up! Seems like this should apply nicely to cleaning/polishing the exhaust tips too. The wheels look great! BTW - are the lips of the rims chrome or polished?

 

I believe they are chrome because alittle spot is starting to peel off I believe....I will show you a pic of my HKS Titanium tips as well..I did the inside of the exhaust tip and it came back really nice!! I will have to take a comparison pic tomorrow evening.

 

will this work on my WORKS VS-XX?

 

I think it will work on any chrome lip/rim that has water spots or rust spots. just take the fine grade and soap and water before polishing....its like doing CLAY BAR to your car but you are doing this to your rims

 

If you use super fine steel wool(#0000), your still going to get micro scratches. Which might be filled in with filler metal polish.

 

+1 to what Scrooge said...Its really hard to capture them in the pic but there are very fine scratches that are really hard to see but nothing that really harms the rim itself. I believe that is the only possible way to get off deep rust spots and water spots.

 

I need to do this to my plenum. The shipping from Cali to Japan took it's toll on my formerly polished plenum

 

I didnt even think about that....guess I will need to do this as well! I have really bad water spots on mine.