My wheels are 18x9.5 front and 18x12 rear. ET39 front and ET37 rear, with a 7mm spacer on the rear.

 

I did these wheels that are on my Hayabusa by hand from the factory black to the final and painstakingly finished wheels that you see. Anything is possible if your set your mind to it! All you need is the right plan and copious amounts of determination!

 

Really impressive. Makes polishing the lips of mine a piece of cake...

 

The mothers power ball thing works pretty well and saves a ton of time.

 

I know exactly what you mean. I have polished my exhaust by hand and it looks great but it is a lot of work. I've been pretty happy with the Griots orbitals so the 3' one should be perfect for this. I have only used them for paint but should work well with the mothers metal polish.

 

I have 2 sets of HRE wheels, and like someone here said the build quality is great.... But the one set that was on my S6 Audi always just pee'd me off to no end for several reasons. One reason was the raise outer lip held water in the rain and it would give me crazy vibration issues. I mostly solved that problem by putting some 1/2" foam weather stripping across the groove in two places. I put it in at about a 30deg angle to the groove right across the void.
The other issue was I had the polished lip bare aluminum thing going on. Well the Axxis Ceramic brake pads I had on the car at the time made a huge amount of dust that would seemingly weld itself to the bare aluminum when it got wet. It would not come off the aluminum by any other means other than scrubbing with a scotch brite pad. I really got sick of trying to maintain the polished look so for a while I went with the brushed look. I got sick of that quickly to so I had the wheels refinished and the lip was then polished and then clear coated. Since that time I have been a happy camper as the wheels are now easy maintenance.

 

have them polished and then send them for clear coat painting.. this really makes the wheels so much easier to live with! i dont know why more wheel vendors dont do this right from the get-go!

mike

 

The reason a lot of them don't clearcoat the rims is because a polished rim is too smooth of a surface for the clearcoat to adhere too

The clearcoat has nothing to 'bite' to, meaning it will eventually begin to lift

Once water gets under it it begins to turn cloudy and lifts and peels even further

After around two or three years (dependant on conditions obviously) the wheels would look really bad

Having said that, I have seen wheels which were 10 years old which had been clearcoated and they were still in good condition - it just depends on the conditions really

 

I ended up using Mothers billet and was pretty happy with the results. They are near perfect. It does take quite a bit of elbow grease though...