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Has anyone tried stripping,cleaning, polishing and recoating their wheel centre caps? Any advice on how best to do this and what products to use?

TIA

Chris

Depends what center caps you will refurb and the condition they just have. Pictures should help to help.

spirit r wrote: ↑Tue Aug 08, 2023 4:23 pm Depends what center caps you will refurb and the condition they just have. Pictures should help to help.

Its these ones. As you can see Ive had my wheels refurbed and the centre caps are letting the side down now. I'm thinking I can strip the lacquer off, polish them a little and then re lacquer them. Not sure if you or anyone else has some experience of this or not?

You can refurbish the cap in the same way you've done with the wheels.
I would try to polish the lacquere down only. And a little hand polish the cap time by time, when not use in salty winter.

spirit r wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2023 6:34 pm You can refurbish the cap in the same way you've done with the wheels.
I would try to polish the lacquere down only. And a little hand polish the cap time by time, when not use in salty winter.

The rims were acid stripped, powder coated to colour of the pockets, then diamond cut and finally recoated with clear powder coat. I think I will try stripping them with a checmical stripper first of all and then polishing lightly as suggested. The car will never see a salted road as long as I have it anyway!

Thanks for your comments.

You will try stripping them mechanical first, saving the black letters and alloy.

spirit r wrote: ↑Sat Aug 12, 2023 3:24 pm You will try stripping them mechanical first, saving the black letters and alloy.

Most probably I will chemical strip and then repaint the black with a suitable paint that flows well when wet to leave a smooth shiny finish. But lot more research to do on this before I attempt this.

Feel like I should have posted an update a very long time ago, but finally got around to dealing with my centre caps!

So I sanded them using 120 grit paper to start, gradually going finer and finer up to 800 and then switching to wet and dry 1000, 1500 and then 2000 grit. No need to go any finer really as the surfaces were looking pretty good at that point. Finished off by polishing with Autosol 1824B aluminium polish. The photo below shows the before and after shots and before several more rounds of aluminium polishing. Finally I applied three light coats of Hycote fast drying lacquer to protect them. All in all I'm very happy with the final results that obviously didn't require repainting the black logo.
On another note just MOT's for another year with a totally clean bill of health. Quote for the MOT garage "underside looks mint, oh and by the way we could have sold the car twice whilst we had it in". Over my dead body!

ChrisR wrote: ↑Tue Sep 09, 2025 10:21 am On another note just MOT's for another year with a totally clean bill of health. Quote for the MOT garage "underside looks mint, oh and by the way we could have sold the car twice whilst we had it in". Over my dead body!

Great result on the centre cap. Sounds like a lot of work (I did something similar to restore my RX-8 headlights, so I know!), but well worth it

They came out really well aye!