Hozan Rim Polishing Block & Bamboo Holder

Rim brakes need maintenance. More than disc brakes do. Brake pads, even good ones, pick up debris from the road, which gets jammed in the pad. That stuff needs get filed out occasionally. The rim picks up pieces of the brake pad itself, and those chunks of glazed up rubber go down into the sorta rough porous surface of the rim’s brake track. This crud does a few things: keeps your brakes from working well, often makes noise, and makes your rim turn all black and gross. A good thing to do every 6 months or so is to clean that surface.

Here’s the procedure: Take your wheel out, and grab a rough, flat file. File your brake pads down until the whole surface looks like felt, no glazing left, no chunks of rim or road embedded. Sometimes you have to use a pick to get small chunks out of the pad. If you have pads that insert easily to cartridge holders, it’s easier to take the pad out, stick the file in a vise, and then rub the pad on the file.

Now, take a spray bottle of denatured alcohol, spray a clean rag, and wipe down the rims. This will melt off most of the built up rubber. Repeat until the rag runs clean when you flip it to a new bit of material. Then, take the Hozan rim polisher, and stick it in the cool little bamboo holder and polish those rims up. Polish by moving inline the the machining on the brake track, not up and down. Wipe down with a paper towel when you are done, bingo, fresh rims. The longest part of this whole thing is prepping the brake pads. The cleaning of the rims, and polishing with the rim block is maybe 2 minutes each rim. One rim block will last you years.