Wheel Cleaning Question / Beef

[tomk17]

Performed a wash and wax this past weekend and thought I would vent on a wheel cleaning beef I have. Lets see how you guys deal with it. Problem is:

- Wash car and wheels including inside the wheels best I can by reaching inside with a mit. Gets rid of all that road grime that collects in there.

- After wash you get that thin coating of rotor rust.

- Drive the car a bit to get rid of the rotor rust and the wheel (both exterior and inside) look like crap because of the rust dust. Wheels then need another wipe down inside and out. Grrrr...

How do you guys deal with this? As you can tell I'm getting the itch to talk Porsche and drive. Northeast winter has been long! Boxster is not DD for me, just get it out every 2 weeks during the winter.

I blow dry the wheels with a leaf blower. This is most helpful in removing the dirty water dump I used to get, after the wheels were clean. Gets all of the dirty water out of the cross drilled holes.

[Perfectlap]

Well you could try to dry the rotors after you wash them to lessen the rust effect.

I'm going to assume you don't have mesh wheels, which is its own ordeal.
If they are spoked painted alloys, have you tried waxing your wheels?

I don't mess with the wash mitt on wheels, too messy. Instead, I have two brushes, a Meguiar's Gold Class wheel face brush for the outside of the wheel, and their spoke brush for the inside barrel. Its not my fave part of the cleaning but I can do each wheel in minutes and its a 1000% improvement.

Another thing I do is fill a bucket with water and add a couple of ounces of Optimum No Rinse. I wiped down the paint first (in the direction of the wind) and then I use the left over water to clean the wheels with the brushes. After drying with the waffle weave, I spray down paint, dash, glass and wheels with FK1 425, its like teflon and cuts down on cleaning.

[Bob Z.]

I second the waxing recommendation....I use "Wheel Wax" but any kind of wax will help reduce the amount of brake dust that sticks to the wheels.

I like the RejeX wax for the wheels.

[tomk17]

I do in fact use Rejex on the wheels - I'm going to try to apply it to the inner wheel area as well to make it easier to clean.

[djomlas]

like Bill said, i also use leaf blower, and its soooo easy.
before that i used that wax-as-you-dry stuff, and it worked great, now they came out with a spraycan kind, so u just spray that stuff on and wipe them down. then after doing that after couple of washes, washing gets easier, so so does water spotting, and drying.

[Lil bastard]

Originally Posted by Bob Z.

I second the waxing recommendation....I use "Wheel Wax" but any kind of wax will help reduce the amount of brake dust that sticks to the wheels.

+1 on the Wheel Wax

[Chills]

Wheel wax, eh? I didn't know such a thing existed. I'm going to go find some because cleaning the wheels takes as long as the rest of the car put together.

[Lil bastard]

http://www.wheelwax.com/