I'm not sure if any is interested but I took some of my free time to polish my rear rim and figured I would do a write up. Do this at your own risk.
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Alot of the KX5s we ride are pretty old and can use some spiffing up. On the same token many of use don't want to put tons of money into the looks department of our bikes when its needed elsewhere. So I am always looking for cheap and even free mods I can do to my bike.
One of the best mods I have done to dramatically change the overall look of my bike was to polish the wheels. I'm not sure about anyone else but this is how my rear rim on my 1991 KX500 looked before i had done anything:
As you can see its pretty dull and corroded.
The items i used to polish were:220 grit sand paper
400 grit
800 grit
1000 grit
1500 grit
2000 grit
Mothers Mag & Aluminum Polish
Plenty of Shop rags
Terry Cloth
Latex Gloves for dust
General purpose cleaner
A few extra hours time to do both rims including spokes and/or hubs
First off I removed the rear rim from the bike just to make things easier. Then I wiped the mud and so on from the rim so I could work with a fairly clean surface. I started with 220 grit and took my time. Take care to only sand in one direction, do not make a cross hatch pattern or it will not turn out as well. You wanna try to get all the small gouges and into all the nooks and cranies in the first step... it will make things easier when you work your way to the finer sand paper. You wont get all the gouges out if your rim is anything like mine! some are pretty deep.It took me roughly 30 minutes to go over one side of the rim with the 220 grit and I was satisfied. Next you can move to the 400 grit. You dont need to take your time with this step but you do need to go over everything. But dont go crazy.
Keep going through the different sand papers until you get to the 2000 grit, it should take you 20 minutes to go through with 400, 800, 1000 and 1500. You'll notice the surface texture become smoother each step. I'm sure at this step your thinking there is no way what you have sitting in front of you will end up being a mirror finish. But trust me...it will. Now, when you go over the rim with your 2000 grit paper, treat it like you did with the 220 grit. Go over everything and take your time to get into all the nooks and crannies. Spend alot of time getting it right because this last sanding phase dictates how well the polish shines the rim up.
The last step is to wipe the sanded area down with a general purpose cleaner to remove the sanding debris. Now would be a good time to wash your hands or remove your latex gloves if you were smart enough to wear them. If not no biggie. Take your mothers mag polish and start polishing small sections of the rim. The best way I have found to do it is to put a dab of polish on a terry cloth and polish a 2 inch section hard until the cloth gets warm. You will also notice after you have polished hard for a few seconds that the polish turns black. This is what you want. After it gets as black as possible go ahead and wipe it off with a clean rag. Its amazing what a good aluminum polish can do.
If you took your time sanding with 2000 grit you should end up with a mirror finish. Good Job! Just keep tearing away at small spots of the rim until you polish everything you sanded. Now, I only did half of the rim because I only had an hour or so to do it. But by all means, do the whole rim at once if you have the time.
You can use this same technique on the spokes and hub. The hub would be hard because of the shape, but a dremel with different sanding and buffing wheels would help immensely. You could also polish alot of other things on the bike. So far I have polished the cylinder head to frame mounts and started the swing arm.
Here is what i ended up with after an hours worth of work and about $12 in supplies:
Now after you have your polishing 100% complete there are two things you can do to keep it that way. Some people clear coat their finished product to keep it from going dull. But the clear coat will make it look duller anyways so I don't like this idea as your ruining your work of art. But to each his own. The other thing you could do is just to keep up on cleaning your wheels and polishing them when they start to fade. Usually once every two months or so.I will post more pictures if you guys need any more. I hope this helps some people!
