Thread: cleaning up hubs

I'm pulling the wheels apart on my ct. The outside of the rim (2pc.) will of course get paint.
What's the best way to clean up/ restore the center hub back to looking new?

I have a bead blast cabinet I use then repaint them with Duplicolor Chevy ralley wheel paint then clear coat them but Im a low buck non concourse resto guy. AKA I ride them

yeah i bead blasted mine to with low air psi. one sett i just blasted and cleared, another set i blasted and powder coated but dont powder coat the bearing seats or the brake pad seats!!

I had mine polished at a chrome shop,shines real nice,not sure how long it will last though.

Glass bead blasting is far & away the best prep method, unless you're going to polish something. In that case, you'd make the job twice as difficult. Plastic media or walnut shells can be used to blast off old paint/dirt without roughing-up the surface but, again, if you're going to polish the items anyway, it's pointless, all of the old finish gets removed during the smoothing & polishing processes.

Polishing the wheel hubs is labor-intensive. The castings have more rough edges than you can imagine. The last one I polished took almost 8 hours. In contrast, keeping one looking good, once polished, is pretty easy. I use old-school, non-cleaner type paste wax (non-abrasive). Once a month application ought to be plenty and it'll remove chain spatter, road dirt and the like. Apply a heavy coating of wax at the end of the season and don't polish-out the haze until spring and the aluminum will look just as good after the winter season. Clear-coating will dull and tend to yellow over time, plus it's not especially durable when applied directly to metal. Eastwood sell a product called Zoopseal, but it ain't cheap and we're talking low-dollar here.

While I tend to favor high-quality, durable products that last a long time, where wheels/hubs are concerned I make an exception. Duplicolor wheel paint, applied direct-to-metal, is the most cost-effective solution I've found so far. The paint is surprisingly durable for what it is and when the wheels inevitably become scarred, it's easily blasted off and reapplied. Rim halves and hubs are good candidates for powder coating but you have to be very careful about masking the hubs. You could probably refinish them at least a dozen times with Duplicolor for the price of powder coat.

As for the brake backing plates, they look best best polished & clearcoated. Happily, the first set I refinished this way - six years ago - still look the same.They do have to be waxed from time-to-time to prevent "worm tunnels" from forming. The brake plates are relatively easy to polish (compared to the wheel hubs anyway). A chrome shop shouldn't charge more than $60 to polish one to better-than-new. Somehow, they just don't look quite right painted...but then, that's merely my opinion; I could be wrong