How to Polish Motorcycle Aluminum

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Michale Levin, and I am with everythingmotorcycles.com. In this clip we are going to show you how to polish motorcycle aluminum. First we are going to start by cleaning the surface. Removing the dirt is very important it starts with a good clean surface. In this particular case this motorcycle rim has a sticker. What we would like to do is for you to remove the sticker. After removing the sticker you would use a special material. In our case we are using an aircraft paint remover. This will remove the existing paint or powder coat off the rim. From here it will require some time to settle into the paint, and then what we would do from here is we would remove the chemical or the aircraft paint remover by using a motion on the tire using any type of rag with a little bit of surface. As you see here just a normal basic motion to remove the paint. This will require a few times, and some rubbing power to remove the paint. As you can see the paint is starting to come up. This could be a tedious process, but you should repeat this until all the paint is removed to a light finish. From here what you would want to do after removing the paint is you would get different types of sandpaper. Keeping in mind that there are different methods to be able to do the same type of finish, which is polishing aluminum. We would want to start by using an eighty grit type sandpaper. Now we are moving onto the sandpaper. We are going to start with eighty grit. Keeping in mind that the first part removing the paint can take easily up to an hour to perform. As you see the sandpaper will continue to get a smoother more brilliant surface to get us that brilliant shine. After performing with the eighty grit sandpaper you want to work your way to higher numbers of sandpaper. Usually what we prefer is to work our way down to fifteen hundred grit sandpaper, and again for demonstration purposes we are not going to go through all the sandpaper that we are going to use until we get to the fifteen hundred. As you can clearly see it is a process of time, and devotion to the surface. And after some time with the polishing you can end up with a rim such as this. A nice surface, shiny, and certainly a different unique look for a very beautiful motorcycle rim. This has been Michael from everythingmotorcyles.com, and thanks for watching."