Bigpower

I will expand on this with further examples as and when something interesting comes in, but as I've already worked on lots of customer's exhausts, intercoolers and alloy wheels I thought I would go into some detail about what I do.

In my opinion the key to this is to go gentle. This may sound counter intuitive but if you go charging in with aggressive compounds, chemicals or tools you may cause far more grief than you set out to fix in the first place. With that in mind, I always start with weak chemicals first of all and then work up from there so a little like this

weak chemicals>mild chemicals>neat chemicals>fine wire wool>coarse wire wool>De Walt

Most manufacturers sell chemicals with instructions that explain whether they can be diluted or not, so just read the packaging and you can't go wrong. Never apply anything to hot metal and it's best to avoid direct sunlight unless you have a water bottle to hand to stop anything drying on.

An example of recently completed work
The custom exhaust tip from APT's Evo


You can see the carbon build up on the interior and the general staining and corrosion marks on the exterior. Not exactly ideal when your car is being featured again in a magazine so time to flex the elbow grease again

With the exterior soaked in mild chemicals to safely remove the carbon deposits, the corrosion marks and general stains I then moved on to a fine wire wool and protective metal polish to finish the job

The microfibre was used to remove the polish and the De Walt was used to de-burr the end of the pipe that goes into the silencer

Oh well, I've got nine other fingers

Metal polishing like this is very time consuming but well worthwhile in my opinion. We spend hundreds, if not thousands on lovely bright metal things; why not protect them and celebrate their shinyness

Here here, now how about finishing my down pipe
Just kidding, great write up mate.

Happy to finish your downpipe Gareth. We may need to skip to the De Walt phase and then refine it from there

WOW - excellent write up chap

If i hate anything more than car washing its polishing metal bits , but seeing how good you can get things to clean up iam going to try and polish my brake calipers . It won't be like a mirror finish but iam determined to give it a go . Iam not keen on painted calipers anyway and as they are aluminium they should polish up nice , but i know iam going to hate doing it . Pete

The heat produced by braking may do funny things to any polished finish unless they are maintained (much as it would with any bare metal). Get yourself some Autosol or Peek and give them a bloody good coat. If your alloys allow them to be cleaned when/if you clean your car, then you should be able to top this up in between time.

You could consider either clean anodise or high temperature lacquer on there Pete; both of these will help to sustain the polished finish (just a thought)

Happy to pick them up and do them for you if that helps

I forgot about the effects of heat , good reminder . I remember seeing some VHT spray on lacquer somewhere which i will probably use . I have only been able to go over the calipers with a drill mounted wire brush but they look like they will clean up ok . Not looking forward to using the Autosol as i seem to get the stuff everwhere apart from on what iam polishing , but i have a big bag of rags ready for that . Pete

Good luck............you can't go wrong with manual stuff really. Just take your time or you'll end up killing your fingers!