Cleaning Brake Dust

[D2Beetle]

Well the brake dust coating on my recently acquired NB was so thick it look like a coat of flat black paint. I tried several products in conjunction with a tooth brush and they all failed to do an adequate job; i.e. repetition with little results and probably because of the thickness of the deposits.

... so I began to experiment with non-approved methods and had only two failures, they are...

The brillo pad work well, although, yep you guessed it, removes the top paint coating. The CRC manifold cleaner worked but if you use too much it allowed the tooth brush to remove the top paint coating. I'll take pics of these failed experiments.

So we all know that the third time is the charm, right... after rummaging through the house for various household cleaners, I saw Lime Away, oh man, what would that do?

It was like giving me something dangerous to play with. Well to make the long story short, it cleaned the brake dust coating off and did not mar the paint coating in any way. It even cleaned out the brake dust pits.

I just applied some to the rim, waited no more than two minutes and went to work with my tooth brush; then rinsed it with the water hose. Some of the thicker and pitted areas required to 2-3 attempts, but it all came off.

[noR]

Thanks for sharing the results of your experiment.

[D2Beetle]

OK here are the experiment results pics...

The first one is the Brillo Pad and I still need to clean this one with the Lime Away; the Second one was the Manifold Cleaner, in which I only did one spot for that one and the rest with Lime Away; the last one is the Lime Away.

Given the age and miles on the car I was surprised to see all the VW logos still intact and no road rash.

[_goREDgo_]

my rims looked just as bad when i first got Red. i tried my hardest to scrape all the crud off but some still remained. so one day i took my car to a professional car wash (not the drive-thru ones) and they included a white wall treatment in the wash. now that did the trick!!!! they looked brand spanking new! i have no idea what they used chemically or if they cheated and used some sort of device instead of good, old-fashioned elbow grease to get all the build up off. all i know is that my tires and rims look great along with the rest of my car. not bad for $15 bucks. oh and they clean the inside as well

[jeromiej]

I tried Lime Away this weekend- awesome job! no scrubbing!

[D2Beetle]

OK, it took some time but I think I finally found the Lime Away that I used; read this post.