I am having my 1996 merlot wheels refurbished and powdercoated at a cost of £220.
I am keen to get the wheel nuts looking as good as possible.
For the chrome wheel nuts I guess I just polish them with a chrome cleaner by hand. Would they come up better if I bought a dremmel tool and polished them up with that or would I polish through the chrome and spoil them. Any other suggestions?
For the locking nuts they look much worse. What would be the best way to get them to look their best? On ebay I have seen “zinc electoplating kits” Would this be anygood or would they not fit afterwards
Any advise would be appreciated
Cheers
Mark - Newbie trying to learn how to make my car look the best I can.
I am wondering if you actually need to keep your wheel nuts ? A quick search of Flea Bay will bring up any number of nice shiney new ones, locking options as. Well,
Thanks for the reply. I guess the answer is I would prefer to recondition what I have if it possible. This may actually be more expensive than buying off ebay.
But is more satisfying if I can find a way to di it,
Chrome is a plating on top of the steel. Once the surface is breached and rust starts to come through, while you can clean that off to some extent it is not like polishing brass or Copper where you are removing the oxide film to show the parent metal. You may or may not be able to make them look OK, but the rust and discolouration will be back very quickly. To restore 16 wheel nuts so get them re-plated, I expect you would probably want to sit down before you were told the price.
Chrome is very hard compared to the mild steel on the nut, so each time you put a socket on the nut you run the risk of the cracking the Chrome and deterioration.
Get one of those metal polishing kits that you see at car shows etc (and probably online), which contain various drill polishing attachments, and polishing pastes. Although the plating has probably gone in a few places, they will be transformed, with very little effort (compared to using a pot of brasso wadding). The rusting will come back, but not as bad, and you could slow things a bit by giving the wheelnuts a light coating of WD40 or wax afterwards.
The way to remove rust from chrome is with aluminium foil. Use either water or oil as a lubricant, they both work fine. However, once the chrome layer is damaged, the steel underneath will rust again easily. The only way to prevent this is by smearing it with something like vaseline, which then attracts dirt. As pointed out above, using a socket will inevitably cause some damage to the chrome.
New nuts aren’t that expensive and should look good for a few years at least.
Incidentally, galvanised or zinc plated nuts are available but don’t have the look you’re probably after. They start off bright silver and quickly turn dull grey after the first winter. They usually don’t rust, true, but they don’t look great either. Many modern cars now have chromed plastic (VW) or black plastic (BMW) cosmetic nut covers, which is a real case of the tail wagging the dog.
