Autosol - Make Your Wheels Shine

I have a friend who loves to refurbish and repair old bikes and other stuff. He often use a polishing compound called Autosol with is generally used to clean tarnished metals such as chrome, brass and others. It’s easy to use, the results are almost instantaneous and you only need and old rag.

 

Yesterday, I decided to file down the old counterweight on my Mantua 4-6-0 drivers. They are to modern and they had to partially go before I could apply new ones. When everything was removed, I look at the wheel threads which had been cleaned with SuperClean in my ultrasonic bath and thought it wasn’t looking good. Still a lot of tarnish, excessive wear, discoloration and, on the blind drivers, a serious amount of nickel plating having flaked off. Suffice to say this model had quite the good life back in the days.

 

Autosol is a polishing compound found in the aut parts department

Often online, you see people restoring old wheels using destructive or inefficient methods. They start with solvent, use Brite Boy, brass wire polishing wheels, sandpaper and all kind of unproductive techniques that make a mess and yield mixed results. What if I could simply put some Autosol on a rag, wipe and polish the metal wheels until all the oxidation and micro abrasion was gone.

 

Left wheel polished with Autosol, right one altered, scratches and missing plating

Sure I did and it worked much better than I thought. Very little product was used. The nickel plating started to shine bright again and the pitted spots disappeared. Even the blind drivers started to look more than decent. I decided to continue on the backside to polish the surface where I intend to had some pickups in the future. Once again, it worked perfectly. Then, I moved on the axles themselves and made them shine so they would turn freely in the brass bearings.

 

Brand new like the day the left the factory

Honestly, it was fast, safe and yielded excellent results. My fear is the wheels may be too shiny which could reduce traction. However, for any other use like car wheels, it’s impressive. I’m surprised to have never heard about that product used in model railroading. I will see if it impact traction, but otherwise, I see a bright (pun intended) future in this method to restore old wheels.

It must be noted that being a polishing compound, you need to clean thorougly the wheels after you have finish your job because it leaves an oily residue. In my case, I dropped the driver into the ultrasoni bath with isopropyl alcohol to remove all the residue that could have been left on the wheels. So Autosol is excellent but in these cases when you dismantle or restore a locomotive.