Hot Rods Nothing like magnesium....

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Alot of great ideas and suggestions.
I kike the idea of keeping them covered …. You think water and air is bad you won’t believe what cat piss does to them.

 

I never found a way to keep them looking like they were just polished, except polishing them. Only those that have tried can appreciate the effort it takes to keep them up. I bought polishing rouge and buffing wheels because regular store bought polish just delays the oxidation. I tried all of them. Nothing looks better than polished magnesium. Nothing.

 

I had a set of 45 yr old Halibrands & the Dow 7 still looked good.

Here they are

 

I too used to run real "mags" and they are a pain in the ass to keep polished, but man they do look good when they are. I'm glad to see this as I am tired of seeing all those nasty gray looking Halibrands. SWC and Big John always had them polished. I love the look!

So what's next, candy paint on your Willys??

 

no! One painted Willy's is enough work! The wheels are needing my attention for sure though...

 

I live near enough to the beach that anything can corrode. I started putting 'Sharkhide' on everything - even stuff that had already started to rust, and I don't have to worry about it anymore. It's amazing.

 

One of those fronts wasnt bent was it...?

 

We used to run my friends Top Fueler at Long Beach and about 10 at nite the fog would start to roll in, you could stand there and see the polished mags loose there shine right in front of your eye's

Moist air is bad news for mag

One tip DONT try to polish any mag yourself as the dust can just blow up and start one hell of a fire, and water makes it worse so let the pro's do it

G Don

 

Yeah. You must be the Brandon that emailed me about that like 13 years ago. Damn small world.

That bent one also had a crack & was beyond repair. I sold the only good front to Dave Mann. The rears went to someone else

 

The plan is to polish my 16" no holes the second the last payment to my buddy is made! I don't like the dark grey look either, and somehow it makes me feel like I'm doing something wrong with these wheels.

The second half here is a quick story about polishing a Halibrand... Back in the nineties I was very good at buying "onesy" Halibrands and matching them up with mates, then selling. I was polishing a 15x6 big window one night out in the shop that still rough cast as machined on a cold night out in the shop. Lots and lots of hand sanding involved. Every ten minutes or so I would sweep all the dust up and drop a match on it and giggle like a freak for second or two, and get back to work. An hour and a half went by and I realized I hadn't done my match trick, so swept up the dust and thought "this is gonna be great".... Dork. The one thing I hadn't counted on was the fact that my garage floor was put in place long after the building itself was constructed, then floated with a course broom. As I dropped the match on my somewhat large pile of dust, I noticed several tiny spider fires going every different direction following every sweep mark in the concrete! Under the louver press, under the car in the shop, under the shelves, under the tool boxes, into every crack and crevis. I didn't loose the shop, but damn that'll go down in my annals as one of the stupidest things I have ever done....

 

When it comes to magnesium fires, I got you beat! LOL I took chemistry as an elective in high school and got just enough knowledge to damn near fry myself with a magnesium fire. I had found a recipe for making gun powder and had gotten the ingredients together and made a batch, played with it some and realized that substituting magnesium powder for the carbon in the recipe would make flash powder like they used for old time photography. Long story short, I charred all the fingernails on my right hand, burned my eyebrows off and melted my glasses frames some. All this with about 3 tablespoons of the mixture. Yup magnesium burns real good!!!!!