Honda Civic DIY

Materials:
- dishwashing soap
- greenpad
- paint brush
- paint scraper
- LePage Poly Super Strippa
- wet/dry sand paper (I used 320, 400, 800, 2000)
- Microfibre towels
- Mother’s aluminum polish

Step 1: Cleaning the rim
You want to make sure you clean the rim very thoroughly. I used dishwasher soap and a greenpad to clean off as much dirt as I could.

Step 2: Removing the clear coat
Pour some of the strippa stuff into a cup, bowl or whatever you can find. Apply generous amounts of that stuff onto the rim using the paint brush. Let it sit for about 10-15 minutes and you’ll get something that looks like this:

Once the bubbling is complete, you can now start to scrape off the clear coat using a paint scraper like so:

You might need to apply the strippa stuff more than once if you don’t get everything out on the first shot. However, if there is only a tiny amount left on the rim, you can leave it and remove it when you start wet sanding. Once all the clear coat is removed it should look something like this:

Give it a quick rinse with a hose:

Step 3: Wetsanding
Now here comes the fun part! Depending on how badly oxidized or damaged your rims are, you may need to go very coarse. My rims had quite a lot of oxidation and curb rash so I started off with 320 and ended with 2000. You may not have to go through as many grits as I did but whatever. The main thing to remember is try to follow the grains of the aluminum. If you don’t, it may end up looking weird. Here are what each of the grits looked like:

320:

400:

800:

2000:

Step 4: Polishing
Instead of reapplying the clear coat, I decided to just use aluminum polish. I used Mother’s polish because I heard it was really good. I used two different towels. One towel I used to rub in the polish until it turned black:

Then I wiped off the black stuff with the other clean towel. After everything was done it turned out looking like this:

I got almost all the materials I used from Wal-Mart. I went to Canadian Tire for the sandpapers because they had so much more than Wal-Mart. All in all I probably spent $25-30 and spent about an hour and a half on each rim. I think that’s pretty damn good considering going somewhere to get it done would cost you about $100 a rim.

_andross_