Sunday, August 26, 2007

Nevr Dull


When you pick up some cool vintage bike parts the first thing you want to do before you put them on your bike is make them look as good as they can. A lot of times that means you've got a nice old aluminum or chrome part and it's not looking its best. I've done a lot of polishing of old parts, first for my 1969 Alfa Romeo GTV car (yes heresy, a car on a bike blog) and now for my vintage Peugeot, and the sweet mixte frame I recently sold on Craigslist. After I picked up those nice Super Champion rims I needed to polish them so I turned to the product which provides the name for this post. Nevr Dull. Bad spelling or not, it does a fantastic job of shining up any old aluminum or chrome part. Even things which you might think are destroyed.

I know a lot of people talk about Simichrome for polishing bike parts and I've never used it so I can't compare, but Nevr Dull is available in pretty much every city and town in the US and Canada, right off the shelf in most auto parts or home improvement stores. It's pretty economical and 1 can lasts a really long time. And those Super Champions look good after about 30 minutes of polishing. The top one has been polished lightly and the bottom one is as it arrived.

I didn't have to use this trick on the Super Champions because they're in good shape, but if you have some aluminum with some scratching you can use 320 or 400 grit sand paper to remove the scratches, finish off with a bit of 1000 grit and then use Nevr Dull to smooth it out and it will look as good as new. Those MAFAC Racer brake levers on the mixte needed a bit of work. After the treatment they looked as good as new.

4 comments:

c-steve said...

Don´t polish the label.... ;-)

K Matthias said...

haha, no I'm keeping the label. :) Sadly the one on the other wheel is missing. I'll keep my eyes open on eBay for some labels to show up. I've seen them before. Cheers --Karl

c-steve said...

I had to clean my mavic rims from the trditional tire-cement and the colour of the label came off. But it´s nod too sad, the Bike is not for the museum.

Karl Matthias said...

True, and my Peugeot is definitely not a museum piece. But I like those decals! They're old-school cool.

 
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