- Polishing IROC Wheels -

Contributed by Alex Pobuda

Here's a step-by-step method you can use to polish your iroc rims. When finished, they have a chrome-like reflective shine, as you can see by the pictures. I hope to get some better pictures soon.
  1. Strip the paint. May take several coats of stripper, and you still might not get every last bit off. To strip, I used Aircraft Paint Remover, bought at AutoZone.
  2. Go after the wheels with some fine sandpaper. I used 320 grit on a 1/3 sheet sander, and finished off by hand. Get the remaining clearcoat off and try to get things as flat as humanly possible. (note: I didn't do anything with my wheel inserts and lug nut inserts except strip them, i just did the flat surfaces of the wheels)
  3. Graduate to 600 grit sandpaper wet-sanding. just keep going over the wheels again and again. You'll notice scratches getting less noticable.
  4. Skip up to 1500 grit sandpaper wet-sanding. Go over them more. Get them to a smooth flat feel. Basically glass smooth.
  5. Get a buffing wheel for your drill and do 3 coats of Mother's Aluminum Polish. Spread some polish around the wheels and buff it until it turns gray or black. Wipe it all off with a towel, and repeat for the other 2 coats. Each coat they should get more and more shiny.
  6. Give the wheel a good wash. Look at it in the sun. You will be shocked at how good it looks. I threw some wax on mine to finish.

I don't know exactly what to do with the inserts yet. Mine look pretty crappy. I guess you have one of 3 choices:

  • Mask them and protect the original finish throughout the whole process (which is a royal PITA)
  • Repaint them. Not too hard at all. Just do a good thorough job masking them off. I might wind up repainting the inserts on mine.
  • Polish them too. This would be a big pain. First off, you'd have to start with like 100 grit paper to get rid of the roughness of the surfaces, and slowly work your way all the way up to 1500 before doing them with the Mother's polish. I have 2 sets of iroc rims, so I'll use the other ones for experimentation on the inserts.

This is a fair comparison. Both were clean wheels taken in similar light parked in the same spot. It's even in the same wheel location on the car. Obviously, there's a difference.

Alex Pobuda

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