I was planning to put some different wheels on my C4 but I really think the factory wheels are likely the highest quality and lightest weight option for a beer budget dude like me. So, I need to remove the deteriorated factory clear coating. Once I get them to bare aluminum I will be able to polish them up nice. Five years ago I'd just grab some aircraft stripper and go to it. Now that methylene chloride is no longer in strippers I'm not sure what route to take. The mild paint strippers on the market now don't do very much. If I can just get these wheels down bare I can sand and polish them to glory.
Stock Vette wheels are light and strong,
I've used aircraft stripper before but not sure if its still as strong as it used to be. It worked really well on some Supra wheels.
Skip the aircraft stripper, it wasn't good enough 18 years ago. I tried and tried to use it to strip some Miata wheels. Get some Jasco gelled paint stripper, it'll come right off.
Or at least, that was my experience 18 years ago. I never checked the ingredients. Didn't realize the good stuff had been neutered.
The problem is that methylene chloride was outlawed a few years ago. It was the active ingredient that did the work in all strippers. Now stuff is citrus based or similar. The whole game changed and nothing is the same.
https://www.epa.gov/assessing-and-managing-chemicals-under-tsca/final-rule-regulation-methylene-chloride-paint-and
Have a pro walnut/dry ice blast them?
I'd like to expand the as yet unresolved question to include removing chrome from aluminum wheels. I know there is no good answer, but on board for Cousin Eddie's question.
How can I tag Chandler? He does wheel rebuilds, he should have all the info
I used to by Benco B17 through a local paint store in the Before Times when MCL was allowed in everything. I checked their website and they have changed their sales method. They still have it for business to business sales. They always shipped product with their own trucks so they do routes in different directions from the factory on different weeks. I guess they will bring it right to you now.
I haven't bought any directly from them since the change but it rips powder coating off like nothing else.
https://bencosales.com/
jgrewe said:
I used to by Benco B17 through a local paint store in the Before Times when MCL was allowed in everything. I checked their website and they have changed their sales method. They still have it for business to business sales. They always shipped product with their own trucks so they do routes in different directions from the factory on different weeks. I guess they will bring it right to you now.
I haven't bought any directly from them since the change but it rips powder coating off like nothing else.
https://bencosales.com/
I used to buy B17 when I did powdercoating. I had to meet their truck driver at a nearby truckstop on the interstate and we would offload the pails into my truck right there in the parking lot.
Now I can't find anything that will effectively cut spray paint whereas the B17 would remove powder in seconds.
Not to further derail the OP, but what about clearcoat on the car rather than the wheels. I've got a car where the clear is starting to fail (cloudy, pitted) but the color underneath is fine (to my untrained eyes).
Not personal experience:
- one YouTube vid looked like "Klean-Strip AR4000" ('aircraft ultra paint remover') may work almost as well as the old stuff with methylene chloride. HOWEVER, it is not for sale in CA, CO, CT, DE, MD, NH, RI or UT.
- various other YT vids look like Jasco stripper works better than most of the other non-methylene chloride 'big box' options
Personal experience specific to a couple sets of late 90's Subaru Outback aluminum wheels:
- Clearcoat can be stripped off wheels MUCH more easily than colored paint
- Bigbox/consumer-grade strippers probably work well enough to take clearcoat off with only 1-2x applications, and possibly well enough on colored paint w/ 3-4x applications plus not too much scraping. But unless you get enough stripper to completely submerge the wheel, it is NOT happening for something like old-school BBS/Pontiac/etc. mesh-spoke wheels!
- Use more stripper and more repeat applications until the paint comes off easily, rather than spending time trying to scrape off partially-softened paint. A plastic putty knife is still an absolute necessity.
- Apply the stripper THICK (aim for at least a 1/8in thick coating: do NOT mess with using a brush or buying the stripper in a tub container, blorp it out of the bottle on to the wheel and then spread it around). Cover the stripper with plastic (newspaper bags or punctured air-pillow packaging work pretty well). Let it sit multiple hours or overnight. IDK if heat helps, but in the summer I put each wheel in a black trash bag and left it in the sun.
- I am not sure I would trust using stripper to remove only the clearcoat on top of paint with the intent to keep the paint.
I intentionally wanted to faff-about with plant-based strippers ('known' to be less effective) and found that Citristrip (available everywhere) works better than Safenol (I finally found it at my local Ace hardware; Soy Gel is made by the same company but is different stuff, has N-Methyl Pyrrolidone, and Ace does not carry it).
Safenol does work almost acceptably well on clearcoated wheels, and removes random cheap spray paint on steel.
Citristrip is about the same as Safenol on clearcoat but works MUCH better on colored wheel paint. It still takes at least 3x applications and scraping. 1-qt of Citristrip is probably enough for a set of 4x half-clear/half-painted 15in or 16in Subaru wheels.
