# A quick guide to polishing exhaust tailpipes



## Jem (Aug 10, 2007)

I thought I'd do a little guide to cleaning stainless steel exhaust tailpipes. While I know many will know this, it's worth doing a guide for those who don't know.

Unless you keep on top of them it doesn't take long before your tailpipe looks like this. These haven't been cleaned, other than with car shampoo for a couple of months, about 2500 miles and being winter they are pretty skanky!

The right tailpipe









The left tailpipe









So you'll need some fine wire wool, you can get this from Halfords, B&Q etc:









Metal polish. There are several makes of metal polish but I find Autosol is very good a readily available:









You'll also need a lint free cloth. An old microfibre polishing cloth is ideal, but you can use an old T-shirt or anything like that.

So simply pull off some of the wire wool, put a couple of pea sized blobs of metal polish onto the wire wool and polish them up. 









Then wipe clean with the cloth. You should find very quickly the wire wool and polish will cut through all the dirt, tar and carbon. the whole job shouldn't take more than five minutes per tailpipe. I find you get a better shine if you then put some metal polish on the cloth and re-polish again. If they are not too bad to start with you can skip the wire wool and just us it on a cloth. Once they are clean, just a quick polish with metal polish on a cloth once a week or so should keep them clean and over time make them very shiny:thumb:

That should leave you with clean shiny tailpipes:


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## beko1987 (Jul 25, 2010)

That is full of WIN! Great job!


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## 888-Dave (Jul 30, 2010)

Thats the way to do it :thumb:

The only thing I would add is to wear a latex glove as it's a manky dirty job and the missus doesn't like the dirt under the finger nail look :lol:


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## Summit Detailing (Oct 9, 2006)

888-Dave said:


> The only thing I would add is to wear a latex glove as it's a manky dirty job and the missus doesn't like the dirt under the finger nail look :lol:


+1 on the gloves!

I'd also add that using a wheel sealant like CG wheel guard etc will make future washing much easier:thumb:


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## Jem (Aug 10, 2007)

Yeah gloves are a good idea:thumb:


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## sanchez89 (Feb 14, 2009)

Chris_VRS said:


> +1 on the gloves!
> 
> I'd also add that using a wheel sealant like CG wheel guard etc will make future washing much easier:thumb:


iv heard this before, i thought that the heat of the exhaust would have caused damage to the wax/sealant. unless it high temp designed?


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## Jem (Aug 10, 2007)

sanchez89 said:


> iv heard this before, i thought that the heat of the exhaust would have caused damage to the wax/sealant. unless it high temp designed?


I don't think that would be too much of an issue for a sealant, so long as they don't get silly hot, which most tailpipes don't.


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## Summit Detailing (Oct 9, 2006)

sanchez89 said:


> iv heard this before, i thought that the heat of the exhaust would have caused damage to the wax/sealant. unless it high temp designed?


You'll find the temp of an inner rim of an alloy after a car's been driven is similar to that of a tailpipe...hence my suggestion of a specific wheel sealant as opposed to 'x y or z' sealant:thumb:


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