Lotus Europa S1: Polishing chrome bumpers

Hi everyone,

I’ve quickly uploaded some detailed pictures of the bumpers before and after polishing. Remember that these are the original 1967 bumpers that were stored in the car when I bought it.

 

These photographs show the severity of the corrosion and the lack of shine on the chrome.

 

There are two methods that I wanted to try to clean up these bumpers.

The first method is the aluminium foil and cola technique. The way this works is taking a small tub and pouring some cola in, taking some aluminium foil and folding it half a couple of times so you get some ‘pads’ you can use to rub the chrome. Then you either dunk the aluminium foil in the cola or you pour some cola on the chrome and you start rubbing the part with the aluminium ‘pad’. The idea behind this is that the aluminium foil is softer than the chrome and therefor it won’t damage the finish. The cola is there because of its acidic nature and it will help dissolve the corrosion.

The second method is using Autosol Metal Polish. I used the regular all purpose metal polish, they state that this contains a little bit of abrasive and therefor you shouldn’t use this on perfect chrome, but in this situation the abrasive will only help. Autosol also doesn’t contain any ammonia, so it is safe for chrome. I just used a clean rag to polish it on and clean it off afterwards.

 

Because I didn’t label all of the photographs and I was too busy making the video, I don’t know what steps I’ve already done in the photographs below, but I believe that I had used both methods on small portions of the bumper, like the part in the middle and the corner.

 

This is what the bumpers looks like when I completely finished using both methods. I found out that the aluminium foil method works really well, but the Autosol polish really enhances the shine. I think that both methods working together gives a very nice result. The bumpers are no where near perfect, but they are a lot better than they were before.

 

I’m not even sure if I will be using these bumpers, because they might be too far gone to go on the car as they are. They look really nice, but not nice enough if you come a bit closer. I might consider to have them re-chromed, but for half the price I can get brand new stainless steel bumpers that will not rust again, so I really don’t know what to do with them.

Fortunately it will be quite a while before I will be needing my bumpers. I didn’t have to clean them now, but they were lying unprotected on a shelf and their condition was only going to worsen if I didn’t do anything. So cleaning them and polishing them will protect them a bit in the meantime. To make sure that they wouldn’t get covered by dust flying around in my workshop I used some packing foil (like a giant roll of cling film) to wrap up the bumpers.

If you want to know more about this, take a look at the video I made about this and it will be much clearer with a better in depth explanation.

 

Enjoy & Share!

Serge