Vanquish 2 grill restoration - A (partial) guide...

[Vanquish Mark]

Hello all,

Please excuse the fact that this post is something of an afterthought, consisting of learnings and pictures that I mostly took for my own benefit before I realised that it may be helpful to others. I apologise in advance for its disjointed nature.

I will split the below into bullet points, hopefully it will make sense in conjunction with the pictures.

- The grill is held to the car with 6 x 8mm nuts the holes for which can be seen in the picture with the red arrows. I found that only these need to be removed once the top cover is off after removing bolts unnecessarily.

- Having watched a very informative video on the DB9, I noted that the grill bars are hollow. Upon stripping mine I found that the grill bars are solid and mounted using Torx T20 screws, making the job of dismantling the grill significantly easier.

- I have found that red jewellers polishing compound is very effective at cleaning and polishing the aluminium.

- Tools used are, a bench grinder with a cloth polishing wheel (not as effective but works), a Milwaukee M12 sander/polisher with a metal polishing pad (I would not substitute this with a drill as the polisher can do >8000 RPM which seems to make all the difference.

[Vanquish Mark]

[Vanquish Mark]

[Vanquish Mark]

[Vanquish Mark]

[Vanquish Mark]

[Astontony]

Great work and thanks for the tips. I have thought about doing mine and this info helps a lot.

[Dewi 2]

Thank you.

On my grille, it seems to be residue water marks that are noticeable.

Are these the correct products for us to use ?

[Vanquish Mark]

I am currently using the red bar from the below but I imagine any jewellers rouge will work. That said, I’m no expert, just experimenting.

https://www.sealantsandtoolsdirect.co.uk/blue-spot...

[LTP]

Not trying to rain on anyone's parade and the results do look significantly better, however I'd urge you to realise that while the grille slats are aluminium they are anodised after they are formed and cut. This means that if you polish through the anodised layer (which may be only around 150 microns thick) you will see a patch of pure aluminium emerge and this aluminium will eventually corrode to the usual powdery, white oxide layer (sometimes incorrectly called "aluminium rust") on exposure to the atmosphere.

If you polish off all the anodising layer you obviously won't get the "patches" but the whole slat will still now be subject to oxidisation, so you'll need to protect the surface with something like a wax to avoid having to continually repolish

Edited by LTP on Wednesday 17th May 15:40

[LPH]

^^^ This is true.

You might be able ti find a local company that can re-anodise them. I have one lcally that are preared to cuck small bis in with bigger jobs for a few quid.

[Vanquish Mark]

A very fair point. I would say that the the surface finish was ruined anyway so would need to be redone regardless, I just wanted to give the free option a bash first.

It will be interesting to see how it ages, whilst entirely possible that I have rubbed through the aluminium oxide layer, it did not appear to changed from the slightly dull factory finish. I would expect jewellers rouge to give a mirror finish on bare aluminium, because that didn't happen I'm hoping that that the cut struck just the right balance between removing the surface staining and leaving the anodising intact.

Time will tell, nothing lost in any case. If the surface degrades then I'll just do what I thought I would have to do in the first place and have them professionally refinished.

Definitely a good point though, I would hate to be responsible for causing issues on someone else's car.

[Caslad]

I seem to remember the guy on Aston 1936 on YouTube used a vinyl wrap after he’d cleaned up the slats.