farmer92
Coast to Coast
The Jimbonaut said:Time for an update. I've become a cautionary tale.
After several more hours polishing with the coarser (red) polish to the point where I had the thing looking pretty damn good (here's one side getting close to being finished) -
- I then re-polished the thing with the white polish, and after several hours of that then gave it a final polish with Autosol. No photo of the final product, but man this thing looked like new. Ok, not like new maybe, but pretty damn good. Thing is, there was lots of black polish caught in the hard to reach areas, and after trying to get it out by washing it under hot running water and soap (to little, but encouraging effect) I had the genius idea to empty the dishwasher, put the valve cover in there along with the soap pod and hit the Full Cycle button - firm in the knowledge that the thing was going to come out gleaming.
Well, it didn't. It came out not gleaming at all -
Black as the ace of spades. Totally oxidized, looking pretty much the same as it did before I started polishing weeks ago. Fortunately at this point in the evening I was half cut so kinda smiled when I saw it. In the morning when I woke up sober as a judge and saw it I was smiling considerably less.
So, word to the wise. Don't put your freshly polished aluminium engine covers in the dishwasher to clean them. It's an awful fucking idea.
Back to scotchbriting and polishing. Christ doing cartwheels.
Damn that sucks dude
I always clean my shit off in a diesel bath, it eats all the grease, and prevents corrosion/oxidation for a little bit since it leaves an oily coating.
If you’re feeling ambitious, you can rig up an old fuel pump to circulate the diesel around in whatever you are using as a tub to speed up the cleaning process.