Clean Wheels The Cheap Way

Colby bought another car to hold him over until he can afford a new car. It’s a nice car that needed a little TLC, but it’s a good driver and will serve the purpose for now. The previous owners obviously weren’t in to detailing their car that much, probably a simple drive through the automatic wash from time to time. Giving the car a good wash made a world of difference, but the wheels were baked with brake dust. Prices for wheel cleaners vary, ALOT! Some are as cheap as 7 dollars and some are as expensive as 21 dollars. I thought this would be a good opportunity to try a cheap method just to see if we really needed to spend a lot of money to clean the wheels. A quick trip to the Dollar Store (the yellow ones), $3.50 for the Dollar General brand of wheel cleaner and the test began. It states on the front that you just spray it on, then hose it off. But I knew right away that this wasn’t going to work. I couldn’t even scrape the brake dust off with my fingernail, this stuff was baked on! But for the sake of argument, I did what it said. I applied the cleaner to the wheel, let it sit for about 5 minutes, then hosed it off. Yeah, it took a bunch of the loose stuff off and the wheel did look better, but there was still plenty of baked brake dust left behind. So, I did it again. Soaked the wheel with the cleaner, let it sit for a couple of minutes, but before I hosed it off, I took a small wheel cleaning brush (in the pic) and scrubbed the wheel lightly. That’s when the brake dust melted away. Just needed minimal elbow grease. Repeated the process on the other wheels and now they look so much better. So, how does this compare with the 21 dollar wheel cleaner? I don’t know, I’d never spend 21 dollars for wheel cleaner. But it does prove that you don’t have to spend a lot of money to get good results. The whole process of cleaning all of the wheels took about 15 minutes.

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