You haven't mentioned where you live - and that would be very important. Winters in the south are much different than winters in the north. Like I'd previously mentioned, if you live in the north and they use any road salt in your area, your nice shiny new wheels will be junk in no time. As for the tire store, remember, they make money when you need to buy new wheels. Ask them for a guarantee and see what happens.

 

I've ran polished aluminum rims year-round for quite a few years. My usual pre-winter routine is to go over them with Mother's Aluminum polish and then hit em with whatever wax I'm using on my cars at the moment...usually just Turtle Wax but I'm not fussy so it's been what ever has been on sale. Apply a good heavy coat of wax, let it dry and buff...repeat 2 or 3 times.

I usually wash the road crud off of my wheels 3 or 4 times per winter season but don't reapply wax over the winter. As long as the wash water is beading up I know there is still wax on the rims.

Good old Johnson's paste-type floor wax is another one that offers real good protection, but I haven't seen that stuff in stores for quite a while. I'm sure it's still on the market.


one more thing...
Next time you've got the rims removed from the hubs, coat the wheel to hub mating surface with copper or nickel anti-sieze compound. This will pretty much eliminate the corrosion that you get from having dissimilar metals (aluminum & iron) touching each other...anyone who's had a set of alloys stuck to the hubs so hard that you need to use a 3lb sledge on the tire (not the rim!) to pop em loose knows how fun it can be to get em unstuck!

 

Apparently North Dakota doesn't use road salt - or at least they don't in your area.

Let me more clearly articulate what happened to a set of polished (uncoated) aluminum wheels I had on a truck here in upstate New York a few years ago. They had been regularly polished and sealed with multiple coats of Zaino. I had them on the truck for one trip home from work (about 11 miles) one day when we got an early snow storm that sent the salt trucks out. Upon arriving home, I immediately washed the truck, then pulled the wheels of to replace them with the factory set. I then went to wash (again) each of the aluminum wheels before drying them so I could roll them into the basement for polishing and sealing for the winter. It was at that point I discovered that I already had oxidation starting. How's that for fast destruction? It took over an hour with a buffer and several porducts to remove the oxidation, but I learned my lesson.

As for Turtle Wax or Johnson's Floor Wax, I think you'll find that conventional waxes (Carnauba base) don't last long on wheels due to the heat build up from braking. Synthetics such as Zaino or NXT tend to last longer, but still won't protect against road salt.

 

Oh yes they do use salt. Not quite as bad as across the border in Mini-soda but they use enough to make things nasty real quick. Minnesota and Wisconsin are the roughest states in this part of the country about using too much chemical on the roads, South Dakota is next. North Dakota...well, we still mostly rely on those 40-50mph blizzards to keep the roads fairly clean.
I spend enough time across the border in MN to know what works on my rides.

Thus my recommendation to keep the crud rinsed off the wheels. Even leaving gravel road dust on polished ALs will let the corrosion start before you can turn around when it's damp or even just humid.

My part-time hobby is detailing planes for a local air museum...bare-metal aluminum on many of the WWII-vintage planes.
Having a good high-polish finish is step one. The smoother the finish, the less particulate matter can get into the pores of the metal and start attacking the base metal. Wet-sand your rims down to 4000-grit using 3M Imperial wet-or-dry, Then get out the polishing compound and finish it out to at least 6000-grit. Flitz or Mother's polish will finish off the job and put a little sealer into the pores of the metal. A good AL polish job will look just as bright as chrome plating...if you can't see to shave in the reflection, keep polishing.
Keeping them clean is the next important step...any foreign material that will hold moisture against the raw metal is the enemy. Any good wax will help keep the grime from attacking until you can get things cleaned up.

The best protection against road salt, alkali gumbo, and that kind of corrosive stuff is to get your rims clear powder-coated. But I have yet to see a clear epoxy job that still lets the metal shine though like a good polish job. It's a trade-off in what you want for looks.

 

I 100% agree on the pore size thing. Trouble is, most people will never go through the process you recommend to get it down - so their wheels will quickly corrode. On top of that, some wheel designs just plain resist proper polishing due to complex shapes.

So I'm back to my original recommendation - store them for the winter after properly protecting them for storage.

 

If this were my truck and I lived there, I'd take them off for the winter, and put a set of plain black painted wheels on it with M&S tires.

 

yeah see i hear both sides from everyone so i am yet to decide. damnit! i have a set of brand new 305s to put on! haha. my truck is well taken care of basically every weekend im out spending hours on it so i do clean it up all the time, therefor the rims will be seeing a cleaning every week. i mean how long does road salt have to stay on for it to mess them up any? my plan for the winter if i run them is to wash them every weekend, dry, then take a drill with the mothers powerball and mothers auluminumpolish and polish them up.

 

If you have the stock wheels with tires mounted on them just do yourself a favor and put them on. Not to insult you, but it's highly unlikely that you're going to clean and polish your wheels every weekend in the winter, or any season for that matter. You start off good, then let it slide on weekend, then it's a second weekend, and then it's out of hand before you know it. Come spring you'll have a mess on your hands. If you don't have other wheels and tires to put on, then maintain them the best you can and deal with the consequences. I have polished aluminum wheels and I plan on putting my stock tires with my old MTZs back on for the winter even thought it's going to kill me. I try to look at it in a positive way though. Atleast with the wheels off, I can really clean and polish them.

 

Yep, during the spring and summer months, I just wash the wheels and apply some Mothers FX Spray Wax. Come fall, I like to apply a couple of coats of protection before they start dumping tons of salt on the road in front of my house.
Anyhow, PB's Wheel Sealant certainly helps to a degree. Zaino is another excellent choice. A couple of the other "wheel" specific waxes were crap in my opinion.

HOWEVER, as 2stroked alluded too... if your wheels are not clear coated, you run the risk of doing some serious damage to them during the winter months.

If they are truly uncoated polished aluminum wheels, and you insist on running them during the winter months, I would consider this stuff...

http://www.zoops.com/zoopseal.asp

Just my 2 cents... and worth every penny.

 

i read on mothers website in the tips and tricks section that you can take a towel with aluminum polish on it, rub into the rim a little and if you get black then its not coated and if you dont get any black they are coated. ive polished my rims a bunch since i bought them and it barely gets black on the cloth

 

I've been using Optimum Opti Seal on wheels a lot lately and it works really well.

 

Same thing I use.