Initialr3

Morning all,

Looking for a bit of advice. My Legacy TbSTI has factory black Brembo's front and rear, not the gold ones as earlier TbSTI's had.

Over the years and 80k of mileage, the black colour on both front calipers has faded ever so slightly, I'm unsure if this is due to wear or if it's cooked on dust & dirt. The only reason I say that is the back calipers are still looking great.

Can anyone recommend how I would go about properly cleaning them? I.e would a degreaser work or make it worse? Any product recommendations?

Once the Scottish weather brightens up I'm going to take the wheels off and try.

I just don't really have the cash for a calliper refurb and paint. Thanks in advance.

ST-X

Have they gone a bit matt too? If you can clean them with brake cleaner then you should be able to just re-lacquer them with some VHT clear lacquer to in effect rejuvenate the gloss. I had that issue with the green calipers on an old vRS Octavia that didn't like the late night runs home I was doing at the time. Fixed it a treat and still looked spot on after another 80k miles when I sold it a few years later. And because it's clear lacquer there's less issue with visible overspray than you would normally have when re-colouring them.

Initialr3

Yeah mate they've went proper matte on the front. So brake cleaner should strip off the rubbish without damaging them? Then some clear coat VHT lacquer over the top?

Stupid question but can it be done with the callipers still on the car, or did you have to take them off? I'm not the most mechanically minded individual.

NOSSY_89

Have you tried a fallout remover. You can relaquer them on the car if you wanted to do it quicker.

ST-X

Yeah, solvent brake cleaner is basically to get any grease/oil etc. The lacquer will then go straight over and give you the gloss back. I'd mask things up but you can leave them on the car don't need to go quite as mental with masking as you would if you were respraying them silver and your car was black for instance.