Doing some winter fettling on my SD.
Got the front wheel off and gave that a clean - looks great.

Next I turn my attention to the brakes as they have some brake dust staining.
I started with the fork bottoms, as that looked like an easy job (wrong!).
I cleaned them with a 50/50 mix of screwfix degreaser (which is pretty powerful stuff) and dirt came off but they still didn't look great.
Next I followed up with fairy liquid - no change. I could see several areas where the brake dust looked like it was etched in to the alloy surface.
So time to get serious.....
Mer car polish with an Oral-B electric toothbrush - nope..
Superwheels alloy wheel cleaner spray - nope.

I'm now out of ideas so time to hit google...
A suggestion for dealing with alloy wheels is to hit it with acid... but what is easily available & has good cleaning acid in it...

Oh yes!
It's acid based (unlike bleach based products), which is why it's also supposed to work well at cleaning stainless steel exhausts.

I gave it a try & it worked!

Check this out - left is after harpic, right is before.







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I then treated the right side as well so this is how they now look,



I'm well chuffed.



It even brightens up the brass adjusters, that happens quickly so it's best not to leave it on long.



Next was time to see how my lovely Brembo's respond to it.... to follow...

The calipers needed a lot more work but that was mainly in areas that you don't see anyway...
Still, they are looking pretty sharp now too.



I also wire brushed the disk bolts (with a dremel) and treated them to some silver paint.
Cleaned up the disks and polished the rims whilst the wheel was out.



So I'm pretty happy with my front end winter clean up.
Ready for the season to start now, hopefully not far away now.

Wow - well impressed with that.
Thanks for the tip - will give it a try.
I guess you need to be careful not to get it on paintwork etc?

Damn that looks great. I wonder if they have something similar stateside.

I always found gunk got the oily grease off and then muck off with a toothbrush brought them up luverly.
You could water down some wonder wheels as it is a little potent and wouldn't want to cause damage.

Thanks guys...

I'm not sure if it'll harm paintwork, I won't leave it on there if it was splashed but I doubt it'd cause damage if removed quickly.

I would wear glasses though, and do it in a well ventilated area, and try to keep your head away from it (or wear a sprayers mask). I found my sinuses were a bit sensitised for a day or so afterwards as I'd been sat in (and breathing) an acid fume area for several hours.

After the cleaning, rinsing and drying.. I went over all the metal work with some Autogylm - Extra Gloss Protection as it's an easy to apply hard wax. I thought this might fill any small pores in the alloy and hopefully stop the brake dust re-establishing too quickly.

Oh, and I also cleaned up and painted the caliper bolts as they looked pretty manky.

Interestingly the PO (or their chosen garage) decided that anti-seize copper grease would be better on these bolts than Loctite 242 threadlock as stated in the manual.....

Thanks mate.

I try to clean the same area hundreds of times and never get them soooooo clean.

It used to piss me off that I could never get the 990 caliper mounts clean.

Top tip. Nice work.

So RickUK,

Harpic is toilet bowl cleaner right? Judging by the bottle's nozzle looks like what we use here to ... clean toilets.

Yes, that's right but it's acid based and not bleach based. As far as I know it's the only acid based one here in the UK, but I haven't looked into all the brands.
If you look at it's MSDS it's basically 5% Formic acid, 1% Sodium hydroxide (caustic soda) and surfactant.



No doubt every country has a version of it on their supermarket shelves.


**Edit...

The actual stuff I used was Harpic Power Plus Max 10 Citrus Fresh and the bottle states 9g Hydrochloric acid per 100g of liquid.

You can buy citric acid directly.

I use it to clean the balcony and works very well.

Probably I try to clean the caliper with it this weekend

For the stateside folks the works toilet bowl cleaner is hydrochloric acid based. I haven't tried it but I will when I can in the next month or two.

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