How to Polish Exhaust Tips

[DFW02S]

Try Eagle One wadding polish. It's a can of soft fibrous stuff with petroleum distillates.
Slow but effective at removing the grime.

[jaykay]

A gent on here recommends Showman's................my tips are now black ceramic so no need!

[jwade]

Use this. It works!!

http://www.englishcustompolishing.com/usca/showmans.html

[Jaxonalden]

Use Blue Magic. Take the tips off, lock them down in a vise and use steel wool to smooth out the brushed stainless. Then pull out a drill with a buffing wheel and put on a shine that will look like chrome.

I did and it is a nice touch in the back of the car.

[sasha055]

Can you take the tips off on 2000 Base?

I couldn't find anything there to dis-assemble

Sasha

[Dale_K]

Visit your local Honda motorcycle dealer and get some Honda metal polish. It works excellently on stainless steel. No power tools needed. Here are a couple pics of a BMW stainless exhaust. It works equally well on the Boxster tip. I don't know what's in the Honda polish but it is the right stuff for stainless exhausts.

[Gator Bite]

I've tried many chemical cleaners, including many of those mentioned in this thread, and I've found the Borla polish to work better and easier than all of them on Stainless Steel. but this will only make your tip look clean and new again.

Chemicals work well if the surface is smooth and only discolored or oxidized, like with the BMW exhaust pipe in the previous post. But you can't get a Boxster exhaust tip looking like that with chemical cleaners because the original surface is brushed with a very course, very deep texture.

If you want to bring a tip to a chrome like finish, you're going to need to spend some time smoothing that surface with a buffing wheel. Here's an example on a Cayman S tip. This tip had some light mileage and use, maybe 10,000 miles.

Before:








After Buffing and Polishing:












In these examples, I used the Borla polish to clean the inside of the tips, where I couldn't get with the buffing wheel.

[Gator Bite]

I dug up some more pictures I can use to help demonstrate what's possible with polishing stainless steel.

This is a Borla exhaust, out of my 2007 Cayman S.



It has about 5,000 miles on it, and it's pretty disolored. This won't do because I had entered the car in an exhaust competition. If you look at the rear pipes, then look diffrerent, smoother than the rest of the system. That's because I polished them before I put the system in, but only from the back of the mufflers back.







Closer to the engine, and the discoloration is brutal.