vwynn

iTrader: (4)

BEFORE!






Orbital + Mothers + White pad

knguyen

iTrader: (21)

WOW nice, what shop did you take them too? How much did they charge you?

ThatSCguy

Hey I know this is a bit 4 years late but the most assistance you can get to polishing wheels to that shine^^^^^^ would be using a polishing wheel.

from my experience from polishing (I am no professional just a diy-er) aluminum wheels, paint other things you're most definitely going to need a polishing wheel. Specially if you're going from something dull like 600grit sanding. You can't jump from 600grit to hand polishing with mothers because they aren't aggressive enough.

So anyways if you are trying to polish your wheels to shine bare aluminum

Tips:
Some wheels have clear coats depending on the maker (you're gonna have to look that up idk) but per say that it is clear coated you will have to either sand or strip of that coat.

going from 600 grit you are possibly going to have to go up to at least 1500 wet sanding if you want it to be really shiny.

(if you want to just polish the lip) I recommend finding an automatic with the same bolt pattern to make sanding its lip easier. You can jack up the car put on the wheel and put it on drive so it will keep that consistent momentum of spinning without having the need to go around the wheel yourself the wheel will spin at a steady pace and position and you just have to sit there and sand beautifully.

Once all that elbow grease of sanding up till 1500 grit is done you can grab your polishing wheel and start with the harsh rubbing compound. You can usually buy it with the polishing pads from Harbor Freight tools since its just the initial polish it is still not up to a FINE SHINE it is just to begin it.

Now having that polishing wheel attachment to your drill or whatever tool you have will cut down the labor time for at least 50% rendering the fact that your hand only has 60rpm(bullpoop estimate)while a drill or a portercable has adjustable rpm from 1000-2500 it varies but it will most definitely help. If you have ever detailed a car to get rid of swirls to compound has to "cut in" so if you're not getting enough rpm you're not cutting in.

The order will always be Coarse, Medium, to Fine with the compounds you will be using. Once you are done with the fine compound bar then you can finally use mothers or meguiars polishing compound because they are what a really fine compound are. If you want that shine you can buy a clearcoat that is vibration and heat proof that makes the shine last longer but keep in mind that clear coat will make the shine lesser. I usually just polish it again with mothers since i do not need to do that whole process all over again once I maintain it and keep it clean I can keep it that way for awhile, I would rather keep the shine that i worked for and polish it again than be lazy and just coat it to make it last longer. because if you clear coat it it will give off a very light tint on it and thats how you lose a percentage of shine.

I am no professional, I have just experienced this back then when I polished my enkei 92's lip way back since I was in high school and I was ballin on a budget I had to improvise on how to make my car look nice for the ladies. Most of these are available at your local auto and hardware stores around you.

I picked up some cheapy wheels just cause i wanted to slap some on already and i could not decide. So once I am on summer break i will post a DIY on polishing wheels from spray painted to mirror shine and I will do a pic by pic step by step on how I did it if it has not been done yet on this forum.

ThatSCguy

Update:
so I didn't have anyone to help me and I'm not sure if manual cars will keep spinning if its off all 4 from the ground and put in gear so i did it without that handicap...

Paint stripped it



Heres the really bad curb rash



And then I metal filed it by hand (keep in mind I am just winging it now since I was not able to take advantage of a spinning surface to keep it even.)





And then 400 grit steel wool wet sand





800 grit wet sand using a drill ( it came from those headlight restoration kits) also available online by 3m up to 3000



Now I just bought 3 kinds of compounds one to get rid of swirls, one to polish, and one to "shine" and a stitched wheel for swirls and polish and flannel wheel to shine all bought from Harbor Freight Tools. I got tired of bending over lol so i used the jack stands to keep my wheel in place without dragging it so badly on the ground.



This was before hand polish you can use any mirror polish products like mothers or blue magic. I did it by hand with Blue Magic. It actually added a shine to it so try it out as your finisher.



After hand polish and wax. I recommend waxing it just to get rid of any excess polish that was left there. It may not be visible but once you wax it you'll see all the residue come off and make it completely shiny







The story behind these wheels is that I originally picked up es1s by Varrstoen but I did not wanna settle with them because they did not have the lip size I desired so I decided to sell em. I settled with these because I picked them up from CL for 300$ and it was pretty cheap. It initially came in spray painted spatty gray it had plenty of bubbles and the spray paint job looked like as if it was a sprinkler that was used to paint it. And I enjoy refurbishing things especially to where i can see a difference. I recently plasti dipped these wheels into pearl white. I used a white plastidip and a pearlizer.





the tires are brown cause i was wiping off the overspray with alcohol lol but no worries its back to glossy black now lol.