If you like your shoes to look nice, you should want your wheels to look nice too. Cleaning your wheels is any easy task that gives great satisfaction. How do you clean wheels? It only requires a small amount of elbow grease, but, said elbow grease is needed 4 times.
You may think that this is a lot of work to simply clean a cars wheels, but we’re a fastidious bunch here at My Auto Shop and we care about caring for your car.
Alright, you’ve convinced me, how do I clean my wheels like a pro?
Good question, it’s a 4 step process that you repeat for all 4 corners of your car.
- You’re going to start off by washing your wheels with clean, fresh water. Once the wheel is nice and wet, get a scrubbing brush and scrub all the dirt, grease, brake dust and whatever else is on the wheels. This loosens the stuff we want off and maximises the value of your cleaning solutions.
- You need to apply a wheel cleaning compound. We STRONGLY recommend that the wheel cleaner you use is non-acidic. Acidic cleaners do a good job but slowly ruin your wheels over time. A noncorrosive wheel cleaner is typically a degreaser that lifts all contaminants and dust. Let the cleaning agent sit on the wheels for a while and you can move on to another tyre and repeat step 1.
- Once the cleaner has sat for about 2 minutes you can clean it off. Come back to the wheel and use the same stuff you would use to clean the body of the car. Apply this with a quality microfibre towel or sponge. The wheel should be covered in foam now.
- Finally, rinse the microfibre towel or sponge and clean the wheels of all cleaning agents with fresh water and a good scrub.
How do I stop my wheels getting so dirty?
Well, now they’re sparkling clean you’ll want them to stay that way.
Due to modern brake components, unless you want $1200 brake discs and pads, brake dust and general grime are hard to keep off your rims. Once they’re totally dry you can apply a strong wax to the entire wheel, this will help keep them cleaner for longer. You could even go so far as to ceramically coat the wheels.
Your best bet is to clean your wheels every time you clean your car.