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Has anyone tried peroxiding pan car wheels with foams attached? Will it have a negative effect on the foam if I submerged the wheels in peroxide and water?

I am new to pan cars, just got an old RC10L3O. So I have to ask why you would peroxide the wheels?

rfulcher wrote: ↑Sat Aug 13, 2022 11:01 am I am new to pan cars, just got an old RC10L3O. So I have to ask why you would peroxide the wheels?

https://www.rc10talk.com/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=14978

I can't help with the original question. I have whitened many things, including wheels, but never had a situation where the foams were good enough to keep.

I'm just spit-balling here but...if it is foam rubber, I know that dryrot is just oxidation. UV light and ozone are some of the biggest oxidizers of rubber, at least 1:1 car tires from what I can tell with my limited research (I do alot of car inspections and like to have something to tell the customer instead of "you need tires") road salts, and other chemical exposure adds to all this, heat cycling, etc. If H0202 is essentially an oxidizer, it's hard to say how it will affect foam rubber. My gut says it shoud be fine. But that doesn't seem a good enough judgment for someone else's tires they are trying to preserve.

I would try a very careful application of that whitening paste stuff (I don't know exactly what it's called or how volatile it is as far as length of treatment time, etc) excluding the foam tires or soak a piece of foam tire in the hydrogen peroxide solution and examine it after the fact for brittleness, shrinkage, etc. Or just toss a test wheel/tire in there and see what happens. I do know that you would want to soak/rinse/soak/rinse thoroughly to get all the peroxide out of the foam matrix after any of this to prevent cross-contamination and/or staining other surfaces that the tire may come into contact with later. Hmmmm. I don't know.

My goal is to whiten the mesh wheels. They have turned a bit yellow and looks from being in a smoking environment. The foams are new looking but hardened with age. I want to clean the car and keep it original because it may have held some historical races around 88-89 timeframe.