help-cleaning tires

martykyj said:
At least I have some options. I was so ticked off that I couldn't think straight.
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The first time I got a dedicated tire cleaner so I could "de-brown" my tires, I also cleaned them 6 times...and I stopped because I thought they must be clean and it was the tire cleaner that just kept pulling the brown out, and I figured I was actually leaching all the anti-ozonants out of the tires.

However, with some forum guidance I kept scrubbing and the brown finally stopped. If the tires are a couple years old and you've just been piling dressings on and only washing with car wash (as I was doing those years ago), it can take a lot of cleaning cycles to get them back to black.
 
I spent another 5 hrs trying to clean up the tires. This afternoon I went to the truck dealership where I bought the truck to find out what is on the tires and the Service Manager told me to call the tire company. He didn't even look at the tires. I went next door to the dealership where they do car washes and detailing & is owned by the dealership. The man looked at the tires and said there is some kind of overspray, got some denatured alcohol and put some on a towel and rubbed the tire. It got rid of it. Next he put on some degreaser, I guess it's to remove the denatured alcohol. When I got home, I called the delearship manager and complained that the service manager blew me off instead of helping and the detailiing folks helped me resolve the problem.
 
Wow, I guess I misunderstood your problem. So when you were doing all that scrubbing, did the foam/suds from the tire cleaners turn brown or not?
 
The suds stopped turing brown after my ninth washing. I used a leaf blower to dry the tires and saw that the tires were still blotchy. That's when I took a trip to the dealership and then to the detailers who washed it off with the denatured alcohol.
 
What are you talking about Bamboo? Denatured Alcohol took the stuff off.
 
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I looked at the MSDS sheets for Zep and Zep 505. The 505 has some
nasty stuff in it. The regular ZEP is 100 times safer.
 
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