ausgeflippt951

Alrighty, so I've got 16" fuchs and I want to polish them. Since I don't have a lot of time, I was going to have someone else polish them for me...

...until I found out that nobody in the goddamn state of Arizona polishes wheels for less than $10000000000000 per wheel.


So, I think I'll bite the bullet and do 'em myself.

I want to do them quickly (i.e., turn them out in a day) and don't want to be scrub-a-dub-dubbing by hand.

What are the steps I should take, after I've stripped the paint from the wheels?


Thanks,
Collin

ELLSSUU

Look up Al Reed in California. If search worked you'd see lots of nicely polished Fuchs. Last I talked to him it wasn't prohibitively expensive.

F18Rep

Ah, the motivated DIYer


This is a 3/4 HP blower motor. With this arrangement, I simply used 240 grit sandpaper followed by some 600 (wet or dry) sandpaper and then buffed using an auto body buffer and some 3M compound. It took about 20 minutes per wheel.... Bruce

PS ... one of my buddies does this as a side job using a cheezy harbor freight woodworking lathe - of course he doesn't tell the customers about the "process." Those country boys, they're a hoot.

hockeydude

lol, and if you have LSD, just get a buddy to do the other side at the same time!!!


haha, all jokes aside, just never try to do the same-type thing by putting the car in gear while it's on the lift.

Yummybud924

i would really like to polish my fuchs aswell when I have the time.

I also don't feel like spending 1000 hours doing it lol.

from what I heard it's not easy to do because you have to get all the anodized coating off first which is apparently a bitch.

KuHL 951

Actually the hard coating you are thinking of is a powder coat in clear. The anodizing isn't a coating at all; it's a porous surface hardening that has to be sanded down first to get to a non-porous layer of the aluminum for bright polishing...in short it's a bitch for the home polisher to do like a pro. Phone Dials aren't anodized but are just as hard to polish because of the rough profile of the casting that is smoothed out at the factory with a primer filler and painted.

bbourdon

Genius!

V2Rocket

if i had my wheels refurbished and the company put clearcoat on my wheels, and the clearcoat has come off for the most part and allowed the surface to pit could i do this to get the shine back?

ritzblitz

Yes, you will have to make sure you get the clear off though.

V2Rocket

would a rougher grit be sufficient for that or should i use a chemical stripper?

ritzblitz

Chemical stipper hands down. Its hard to sand down clear coat.

Mike Murcia

I've been using a benchtop version of the same technique. Motor drives the small utility wheel which rides on the inside edge of the rim, turning the wheel which is mounted to a spare hub. A variac controls the motor speed...

Funn944

You'll be biting more than a bullet if you want to polish Fuchs at home.