Miele Man

It's amazing what one can do with lots of time and elbow grease.

i have a pair of Shimano EXAGE clipless pedals. i hate the grey anodizing and far prefer polished aluminium for looks. therefore I decided to remove the grey anodizing and then try and polish these pedals. Unfortunately I didn't take any BEFORE images of my pedals. I did find images of the very similar Shimano EXUS clipless pedals. The only difference between these and my EXAGE pedals is the part right next to the pedals body.

Here is what the EXAGE clipless pedals looked like prior to the modifications and polishing.

Shimano Exus Clipless Pedals by Miele Man, on Flickr

The red arrows sho some of the casting seams that I filed off. I also filed off the ridge on the outside of the pedals and smoothed the transition from the bottom to the top of the sides of the pedals.

I scraped as much of the grey anodizing off as I could and then used a file and various grits of emery cloth to reshape the sections I wanted reshaped. Once that was done to my satisfaction I used various grits of wet/dry paper wet to remove the scratches and to polish the aluminium alloy pedal body. This project was done entirely by hand. I started with 180 grit wet/dry paper and ended up with 12000 polishing film.

This is the result.


Shimano Exage Clipless Pedal Refined & Polished 1c by Miele Man, on Flickr

Shimano Exage Clipless Pedal Refined & Polished 1d by Miele Man, on Flickr

Shimano Exage Clipless Pedal Refined & Polished 1e by Miele Man, on Flickr

Shimano Exage Clipless Pedal Refined & Polished 1f by Miele Man, on Flickr

Shimano Exage Clipless Pedal Refined & Polished 1g by Miele Man, on Flickr

The EXAGE 500 Crank also took this chrome-like shine when cleaned of the grey anodizing and then polished.

Cheers

exmechanic89

Nice!

Narhay

Very nice.

davester

Very nice. Now, you're not going to step on those with those nasty sharp cleats, are you? I gotta say, my pedals are the parts on my bike that get the most beat up by just regular riding. Just a few hundred miles and they're thrashed (but then you can always polish them again, right.

randyjawa 

Impressive! Been wondering about doing something like that to my SPDs. Wonder if they would look that good?

Miele Man

Perhaps. try it and see?

I think those Exage pedals will look really great with those MIELE shoes I bought from you.

Cheers

lasauge 

You scraped the layer of anodizing off by hand? That's impressive, what exactly did you use to do that step?

Miele Man

I used an Xacto knife and then I used a file to smoothe out any marks left by the knife blade and to also remove the casting seams and then to get rid of the ridge on the outside of the pedal body. I wanted a gradual transition.

When I had the reworked pedals on my bike and went to the bicycle shop to show them, the owner thought they were Campagnolo and had trouble beieving they were Shimano Exage.

Cheers

italianbiker

looks great.

daf1009

Wow...those look crazy good! Outstanding...how long did it take you?

Miele Man

To be honest I don't know. I did them when i was bored. Put a movie on and worked on the pedals whilst watching the movie. I imagine it'd go a LOT faster if the pedal was taken apart but I didn't want to do that. Also, I did them entireoly by hand. A bench polisher would really speed up the job.

Cheers

Miele Man

The alloy in the Exage stuff must be a pretty good quality. Here's an image of an Exage crank I polished for my MTB single speed. Cranks are a lot easier to do than clipless pedals are.

IMG_2752 by Miele Man, on Flickr

Cheers