Sprucin' Up My GS Wheels

12-10-07

Friday I bought the HF $29.99 blasting gun and some goggles, and about 18#s of Arm&Hammer.
I used it all.
Actually you can buy a 12# bag at Costco for about $5.

Used my dad's inherited big-ass compressor.

First to removed all the old weights and cleaned all the goo and road grime off with Goof-Off and a plastic scraper.

Here's the wheel(s) before.

Even though I'm going to replace the bearings up front I capped them off with a fruit juice cap and duct tape.

Saturday morning was crisp and clear, a slight breeze that was blowing away from my garage so I set up on the garage apron and began.
I wouldn't suggest this unless you live in a rural area like me. Like I was told, a big mess. Even in a cabinet you'd need a vacuum to suck all the, dare I say it, "white stuff" out so that you could see what you're doing. This front before:

The front after: At 80-90psi the soda worked very wheel, and surprisingly quick. I used about 8-9#'s per wheel, but I wanted to be thorough.

Rear:

Granted it didn't get all the black spooge off but the visible areas where nice and clean. The rims, well, I just went for it, they came out nice and clean with a nice satin finish....will they polish? Do I wanna? Guess I'll find out...

The front nipples came out nice and shiny. The rear had alot more corrosion, so the nips had more rust. I suspect bead blasting would help. I set up a quick test inside a dryer drum with the 24 grit walnut media. I tried the gravity gun but the media wouldn't go through so I used my dad's HF hopper. I didn't seem to do much. More mess and trouble to build a cabinet. I passed on the glass beads too. I decided to just go with what I had. The HF gravity gun worked great with the soda, probably well with the glass beads too.

I spent the next hour cleaning up....by the way I was glad I had a respirator, and the HF $1.99 goggles where worth it.

Incidentally, if you use the soda and want to leave the satin finish, make sure you get the wheels completely clean without any soda residue, the soda/water seemed to leave little etched watermarks. I had to do some touch-up with the blaster after I washed the rims.
After the clean-up decision time...leave the rims all satin or...I know, I was told they'll be dirt magnets. I'm leaving them. But I decided to test on a spot inside the the rim with my fav polishing compound FLITZ.

The blasted rim polished up suitably. Not the gleaming chrome-aluminum from the factory look, but nicely anyhow. The pneumatic drill came in handy here.
I'm going with just doing the outer rim and leave the inside rim satin. More work than i want to polish the entire thing ...'sides, it I like the look.

The spokes on the front wheel were in pretty good condition, the rear still had rust pits and scaling. The soda brightened up the spokes but did little to the rust deposits. I touched up the nasty bits with a Dremel with a brass mini-wheel and then took my FLITZ and buffer cone to the spokes. This removed most of the residual stuff. Again, not perfect, but I'm shooting for presentable wheels, not show quality here. I'd be hard-pressed to just through a new sat of tires on these crusty lookin' rims and call it good...but that's just me. I'm from SoCal...it's a SoCal thing.

End result, a full day of elbow grease and filth and I like the result.

I can obsess some other time. For now...I gotta sit down...

New EBC Rotor

Finished!