I have a 2006 King Ranch in great shape. There are tiny scratches or hard water marks around a quarter of an inch long that line the "spoke" of the rim. They are very bad on the front driver side and passanger side. Maybe a couple on the rear rims. The marks or scratches are not noticable until you get in close. I noticied them the first time i cleaned the rims with car wash and removed the brake dust. The marks will not come off with any polish or cleaner for aluminum rims. And i have not used a hard brush of serious, damanging cleaners while cleaning. And i do not take my truck offroad much and definitly not through deep mud or water. Also the delarship thought it may have been a clearcoat problem. I have the 18" standard KR rims. Does anyone have any advice?
Thanks for posting pictures. Now we can all see exactly what you've got. Unfortunately, what you have appears to be the early stages of clear coat failure brought on by abrasion. You've probably noticed that you have more of the effect at the sharp edges of the wheel spokes. It looks like something (car wash brushes, running through stiff brush or trees out in a field, etc.) has abraded your wheels. Adding insult to injury, your clear coat is actually the thinnest right at any sharp feature like the spokes.
So, polishing / rubbing the scratches out will solve one problem (ugly scratches) and cause a new one - no protective clear coat. Since you don't live in an area where road salt is used, that might not be a huge issue, but having no protetctive layer will allow your wheels to oxidize very quickly. That said, I could polish your wheels out and remove almost all of those scratches, but you'd hate me several months down the road when the wheels look even worse.
My advice? Leave them just the way they are and apply a coat of a good synthetic sealant (like Meguiar's NXT 2.0) since it has some fillers in it to hide scratches and give you some protetction.
Sorry to be the one to deliver the bad news, but I tend to be brutally honest. You will be very pleasantly suprised how well NXT 2.0 will hide (at least temporarily) those bad boys though. Good luck!
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