Does anyone know if the black part on these Nashabr brake levers is just painted aluminum and if so, I can just strip it off(with turpentine or acetone) and polish the aluminum underneath right?



I'm gonna try it tonight anyway, but thought I would check to see if anyone had done this already, salsa makes an all polished aluminum inline brake lever but they are crazy expensive

might be anodized, in which case you'll need easy off. Make sure you dismantle the levers first.

yeah, I just stripped the anodizing off of my zefal frame pump and polished it over the weekend

I'm worried that the piece may not be aluminum but some lesser uglier metal hence why they didn't polish it to begin with

It saves them money to have a robot paint instead paying someone to polish the piece. I'm guessing that it's paint rather than anodizing. My Tektros are painted. Try paint stripper. If it has no effect, it's anodized and oven cleaner will remove it.

I have those levers on two of my bikes. They have a hard matte textured finish on them and magnets don;t stick to them. I'm guessing they are anodized aluminum.

I guess I'll try the paint stripper first, as it's a little faster and easier and then oven cleaner if that doesn't work

If the lever handles are anodized, then having stripped the black (whether anodized or not) there will be a slight difference in the finish of the mounts and the levers. To get them to look the same, you'll have to strip/deanodize both. Depends on how fussy you are.

How did this turn out?

Well paint thinner and steel wool did nothing, so I'm pretty sure they were anodized.

I sprayed them with Easy Off and let them sit for almost an hour. Then I went at them with a little steel wool. Just like my previous experience with deanodizing there were still plenty of un-deannodized spots, so I cleaned them off and sprayed them again, letting them sit for another hour. Then more steel wool and some water to clean off the oven cleaner. I brought-em inside and gave one of them a quick once over with some 600 wet dry sandpaper, and then a half-assed polishing with a little blue magic just to see how well the deanodizing worked.

Overall not bad, in the photos you can see the Nashbar logo still sort of etched into surface from the anodizing process, This week I'll do a more thorough job of sanding the pieces and then polishing them, I'm confident that I can get a finish almost as good as the polished levers themselves

You sometimes have to reapply the oven cleaner a few times to get it all. It's the same when removing paint with stripper. I use 0000 steel wool before the polish.

Wow... That came out pretty good. Thanks for doing this. I will never miss a deal because I don't like black anodizing ever again!

Yeah, I got these levers used on Ebay for 23.00 shipped, that beats 32.00 new(not including shipping) at Nashbar and sure as stink beats 75.00 for the salsa levers on Velo Orange.