Deep clean chrome wheels with Mothers PowerBall Mini

**Ron Atchison** · 08-08-2012, 10:38 PM

First let me say that I wasn’t planning on doing a product review but once in awhile you stumble across something that works so well you are really wowed by it. And that’s what happened when I used my Mothers Powerball Mini to deep clean my chrome wheels. Had I known it was going to work so well I would have planned it out so I could have documented it with more step by step pictures but as I said I was just planning on cleaning my wheels and didn’t think they were going to need any more than a hand polish.

About a month ago I had to have some warranty paint work done on my new truck and found a light amount of clear paint over spray on the running board and left front wheel but hadn’t a chance to take care of it until the other day. Seeing how it was a very light amount I started off with Mothers Chrome Polish and a MF towel by hand. I was able to get it off of the running board without much of a problem but it is also a flat horizontal part, easy to work on. When trying to clean up the front wheel the chrome polish seemed to be doing the job but was taking a long time; the overspray was heavier than on the running board. Luckily it was only on half of the wheel, I’m guessing the tire cover was too short at the body shop.

Remembering a post that D300 was a good chrome cleaner I decided to give it a try to see if it would speed things up. Going back over the same area it did seem to brighten it up but it wasn’t any faster at polishing the next section. Once I had gotten the overspray off of about a quarter of the wheel I started using clay to remove the rest of it, that sped things up a little. This was taking more time than I wanted to spend and had only done one wheel and already had sore fingers. Remembering Forest had sent me a Powerball Mini to try, I got it and the drill out and gave it a shot on the same wheel with chrome polish. All I can say is wow this baby works, It really amped up the shine and depth of the chrome with very little effort. Moving to the rear wheel I was able to polish it start to finish in about ten minutes.

Backing up to the deep cleaning part of it. The truck only has 1700 miles on it and the wheels were coated with Opti Seal when I first got it which probably helped in releasing some of the overspray. I had clayed and polish the whole wheel by hand and could see no overspray or any brake dust residue on the wheel or clay which is white and was perfectly clean as far as any brake dust is concerned. Other than dust and water spots from sitting in the rain the wheels were exceptionally clean and only needed a wipe down with UWW before polishing. Armed with the PowerBall Mini I decided to start with the wheel I had just polished. To my surprise the PowerBall started turning a brownish color indicating it was cleaning brake dust out of the chrome that had just been polished by hand and the wheel really started shine like crazy and that is when the review started……….. Hopefully you’ve been able to endured my story and finally get to see what you really want to see and that are the pictures.

PowerBall Mini as you’ll find it at almost any auto parts or big box store.

It comes with two attachments. The longer one has a plastic sleeve over the shaft so that the shaft can spin in your hand as you polish the surface. This is the one I used and it worked great. As you can see the longer one gives you 8” of reach and the solid one is 1 ¼” long.

As you can see the shafts and connecting screw are fully cover by the foam so they won’t come in contact with the surface being polished.

This was the condition of the wheel prior to polishing. You can see that there is no real concernable amount of dirt just normal dust and water spots, the truck was parked during the rain.

MF towel after cleaning the wheel by hand with D300. As you can see a fair amount of brake dust residue was removed.

This is the clay prior to using the Powerball Mini. By looking at the clay one would guess that the D300 had removed all of the brake dust residue.

The foam on the PowerBall foam head is going to tell a different story though. As you can see there was still a fair amount of brake residue still on or embedded into the chrome. So happy I did this as I will coating them next week with Opti Coat.

Clean up of the PowerBall couldn’t be easier. Once you take the shaft off of the foam head the attachment screw and plastic clip can be removed for washing. I used XMT pad cleaner to wash it out. All of the pictures of the PowerBall were actually taken after I had polished two wheels so you can see it cleans up nicely.

Hope you enjoyed my review. As always questions comments welcomed.