Clean Your Tires and Wheels First When Cleaning Your Vehicle
When you clean your car or bike (or indeed any vehicle) the first area you should start on are the tires and wheels.
The reason is because they are usually the most grimy and dirty. So you don’t want to clean other areas only to get the dirt from the wheels splashed back on them.
You need to decide if you want to use a general purpose cleaner or spend a little more and get a cleaner specifically for wheels. Since the wheel cleaners are generally quite inexpensive, I usually go for these. There are too many cleaners to list here but you can usually see a large variety of cleaners in your local automobile service store.
You’ll also need a brush , two buckets , some clean rags and some wheel wax .
If you have a water blaster you can use this to get a lot of the initial grime off the wheels. Don’t be tempted to set the water to max as you’ll probably end up splashing dirty water all over the place, including your garage, the rest of the car and yourself. I should know, I’ve done this often enough!
- Fill both buckets with warm water.
- Work on one wheel at a time.
- Apply some of the wheel cleaner liquid to the wheel and start to brush it in with circular motions. Do the same on the tire.
Keep rinsing out while you work in the first bucket and eventually most of the dirt will be gone, hopefully ending up in the water of your first bucket. - Give the wheel and tire a hose over or use the water blaster. Then use the second bucket with your rags to go over the entire wheel getting into all the nooks and grannies. Then do the same on the tire.
- You should next dry the wheel with a clean rag (not the same one you used in the previous paragraph) to prevent soap scum.
And finally you can go the extra mile and apply wheel wax to the wheel to help protect it and give it a great shiny look.
