hpp wheel cleaning

[87gtVIC]

500 for all four wheels? Not bad at all. My Fireturd's originals need to be redone so that gives me a rough idea..

Yes. 500 Total which included mounting and balancing the new tires. I fully expected to have to pay extra for the mount and balance but no. Much happy.

[DerekTheGreat]

Very nice.

[IPreferDIY]

Instead of starting a new thread, I figured I'd add my experiences with less difficult cleaning here. I recently got a set of 2001 HPP wheels in fairly decent shape, and a set of '96 HPP wheels is less decent shape. The biggest problem has been that both sets need a good cleaning. Since we had a couple of relatively mild days in recent weeks, I finally took off the center caps and started cleaning them up.

For now, I just limited myself to the insides and resorted to soapy water (with Dawn dish soap) and nylon pot scrubbers. It was amazing that under all the dark, rusty-looking stuff was a whitish/grayish surface. Whenever it gets mild enough again, I'll do the insides again until I'm satisfied they're as good as they're going to get. Hopefully all the soapy water flowing down will have helped with the outsides whenever I finally get to them. I'm figuring on just using the blue shop towels that come in a roll when doing the lacy stuff. They stay bunched up nice when moist.

I've never bothered doing anything fancy with the ones on my 2000 MGM, so I'll be going at them eventually. It seems to me that the only way to clean them properly is to take them off the car and give some attention to the insides before focussing on the outsides. For those who change their brake fluid themselves every couple of years, that would seem to be the ideal time for periodic thorough cleanings that should help make the more frequent on-the-car cleanings less burdensome.

[IPreferDIY]

Holy f---. Here we are 18 months later and I only resumed the cleaning ordeal on my replacement wheels yesterday so I can finally put them on my car. (F'n eye problems.) I had actually removed the old tires from my shitty rims some weeks ago and decided to try WD-40 on a couple of them around that time to see how it went. Those ones had more of a rusty color on the inner sides, and I've found WD-40 to be something like a dish soap for rusty metal. It worked well with a nylon pot scrubber on the inner sides. I don't recall the extent that I used the scrubber on the outer sides, but it was as little as possible. The result was good enough for me. Anything that remained looked to be either corrosion or rust damage to the finish. I can't imagine getting them any cleaner with anything else. The insides of the lips had lots of powdery aluminum corrosion, and that will require more work.

The replacement wheels had more of a black color on the inner sides. Yesterday, the WD-40 took off a lot of stuff that the Dawn dish soap had left behind, but once was not enough. It gave me the impression that the inner sides had been sprayed with a light film of road tar or something, which had magically stayed on the inner sides. On the outer sides, I was able to use only my finger except for the sharpest corners, which I left alone for the night. Today, another go of WD-40 on the inner sides got some more stuff off. I was left with the impression that even more might come off, but I'm not going to bother. For the sharp corners, I just used folded paper towels and got most of the crap out. What's left is either rust damage to the finish or not worth bothering about unless I find a suitable brush before the next step. Maybe the Brown Royal would do better, but meh.

The next step will be washing with some Simoniz "Wash and Wax" (for lazy people). I'm happy with this stuff for my 'good enough' car washes in the rain. Once they dry, I'm going to deflate them and spray around the bead with some silicone spray. Hopefully that will soak in enough to prevent the sort of corrosion that I found on my shitty rims.

[87gtVIC]

Found a new product for getting rid of nasty tar. It is called citrol 266 by schaeffer and it is great at breaking down the road tar that accumulates in those hpp spokes. It softens it like nobody’s business and it bleeds off. I have also since cut out the brown royal in favor of super clean. It’s significantly cheaper and easier to obtain and has many many purposes.