I think the pics speak for themselves.

That looks great! What is the foil trick?

All this time I though the FOIL trick was only good for multiplying binomials!
Did you wax over the chrome when you were done? I don't know if that does any good, but I always do.

And I wet with WD40 instead of water.
-John

Tinfoil...It's not only for baking cookies and making hats.

Aluminum foil is also good for smoothing and cleaning old cables and oxidized spokes. It works well when cleaning eyelets on unbuilt rims. I even use it to polish a bearing cup, when I feel the need to do so...

Is that what you think it is or is that what you know it is going on?

My hypothesis -
The iron beneath the plating rusts and opens pits (pitting). The rust protrudes from the pits. Scraping with foil mechanically abrades the rust and deposits aluminum onto the rust, thereby coating the rust. The pit is still there. The rust might still be there (under the aluminum). The eye is not sensitive enough to discern the reflectance difference between small dots of aluminum against a large field of chrome plating.

My hypothesis: it's simpler than that. Aluminum foil balled up removes the iron oxide, simple abrasion. Oxidized chrome is chromium oxide, which is transparent, not reddish like the ferrous oxide. Chromium when exposed to air naturally creates this oxide (passively), which protects the steel from rusting; in fact it is this passivation that makes stainless steel "stainless" -- it has enough chromium in it to make a microscopic layer of chromium oxide on the surface which, absent abrasion and embedment of foreign material (salt, ferrous oxide) prevents rusting of the steel. Disturb that microscopic layer, and stainless steel rusts just as badly as carbon steel, or even moreso.

Recently I cleaned my bike which has a lot of stainless steel on it, it's not chrome plated. This was my first real bike clean but I had used alu foil on small parts before, this time I used a steel spunge and a Vim type cream cleaner together, because it wasn't just about the rust but there was a lot of other dirt too. The nice thing about steel spunges is that you can pull them apart into a steel rope and pull it back an forth around tubes and rims, between te spokes. I was very happy about the result and it didn't strike me as very different from the result with alu foil. Maybe there was aluminium in the steel spunge, I bought them in a Chinese supermarket so I couldn't read the label. Maybe stainless steal is just a great material that doesn't scratch when it's cleaned with an abrasive?

Anyway, I'll try if it gets any better with alu foil and let you know.

It is interesting to consider how the foil thing works, but it is really not important, in my mind. I only know that it work and works really well. Abrasion, sure and no one likes to scuff up chrome plating, but is that what is really happening..?

Yes and no. Yes if the plating is unblemished due to the impact of the environmental issues over time. That would prove damaging to the chrome. But to use foil on a fifty year old surface, that has suffered the whims of time passing, it is not scuffing. It is removing oxidized material. Try this little test...

On a piece of oxidized chrome, that looks like this...


tale the time to clean the oxidized mess off with conventional means (soap and water, to remove as much grit as possible, then cleaning wax coupled with plastic scrubb pads, to remove oxidized material and things start to look good but do they feel good? Probably not as you will find that the oxidized chrome did not all come off (slide your finger over the surface and feel the roughness). But if you rub the area with foil, those little rough spots disappear, just like that and it looks like this...

I wonder if that's the difference between success and failure. I tried this a few years ago using dry foil... It deposited lots of foil, that was obvious, but I don't think it filled the pits well, or improved the look much I was very disappointed witb the results and decided after multiple attempts, that either I was expecting too much, or it was like those vinyl repair kits sold on TV- not actually possible in the real world...
Later tonight, I'll give it a try.