I have Mickey Thompson Classic II aluminum wheels on my Jeep (for another week or so as I just bought some black Pro Comps). Does anyone have any good polishing tips/techniques. They are really oxidized.

I would like to clean them up, then sell them, but I am unsure if I have the skills to do it. If not, I will probably try and just sell them cheap and be done with it.

What is the best way to polish aluminum. I tried it with aluminum polish and a mother's ball/drill combo, but after 10 minutes, I still hadn't made much progress. Does it take a lot longer than that? Should I take them somewhere and have them polished?

 

Elbow grease, a clean rag and mothers metal polish. Not some new gooey stuff, but the thick compound in the can. Take that silly ball and throw it in the trash.

You're probably looking at about an hour per wheel, so you need to ask yourself if It's worth your time. They also could be too far gone and need blasted.

 

The ball/drill combo is what worked best for me when i had my alloys....I would apply the polish by hand and then buff most of it off with the small polishing ball, then finish buffing with the big polishing ball....I know, that's alot of money tied up in polishing balls but it did make the job much easier!

 

Wow, an hour per wheel??? Seems like my silly ball technique did the trick in about 5 minutes per wheel....


EDIT:
Here's an older pic of mine back when I had my alloys and was polishing them with the ball/drill combo....

 

The OP suggested his wheels were pretty oxidized. That's a whole lot different than cleaning up some dirt and putting a little bit of shine on them.

 

Mothers or NEVR-DULL. When I was in the Marines we used NEVR-DULL for everything. I also used it to polish a set of aluminum wheels from a 74 waggy that I put on my '75 cherokee. They were extremely oxidized when I got em, and they looked like new afterwards.

 

The picture I posted above was taken after several trail rides with mud eating up the finish and a few months of not polishing....then just used the ball and drill with some polish and they looked like new. I've done the elbow grease thing before, but in the end you get about the same result so why waste your energy?



If you're gonna go the elbow grease route, then the Nevr-Dull is by far the easiest one I used myself....didn't last as long as the mother's alum polish but still gave it a really good shine.

 

Try that in a part of the country with regular snowfall, salt and chemicals on the road. Totally different animal.