homemade tire dressing/glaze?
 

Anyone ever tried making their own tire dressing/glaze stuff out of cheap and easily available household products? Like mineral oil or baby oil or something? Is there some silicone you could buy in a liquid form and mix with baby oil? This price for the real stuff is getting outrageous. 7 and 8 bucks for 12 ounces?! Sheesh.

I would NOT.

Do not use silicone, which is probably dissolved in petroleum distillates, or baby oil, which is.... oil. They're both bad for rubber.

Use what you can buy. The type of silicone dressings found in most vinyl/rubber protectants and tire dressings are the only type you should be using. Try to avoid the clear, colourless stuff if you can.

I don't know how thickly you glop your tire dressing on, but it takes me an awful long time to go through even one bottle of tire gel. :gotme: I bought an armload of tire dressing on clearance last year and bottle #1 is still going.... Even those big cans of No Touch seem to last a while for what they cost.

Many of the car washes where I live use this stuff that mom and pop detail shop product store sells. You have to rinse the sprayer after using their tire glaze cause the gasket inside the sprayer will be eaten up by the silicone in the glaze and you'll be squirting the stuff from under the spray collar onto your hand and the ground. So I imagined that it probably does eat into the tires. I just assumed it penetrated the rubber to last longer. I figured that long term damage was acceptable because the tires would be worn before the glaze could really affect the performance or appearance of the tire for the worse.

BTW, this stuff car washes use (and me to lately) is actually blue. They make some red stuff too. So what is this No Touch stuff? Is it supposed to be a tire cleaner or glaze or both? Do you apply the stuff without cleaning the tire first??

about a year ago i saw some-one wipe there tires with corn oil. :grinno:

Well the jury is still out about the long term/short term damage thing - it's something that a lot of people say. I just feel better using stuff that you know won't damage anything.

Not sure what that blue and red stuff is, but the No Touch dressings themselves don't have much of a colour I think. The Original comes in a kind of white can, the High Shine in a red can, and the Wet stuff is in a black/purple can. IIRC only the really shiny Wet product doesn't "clean and dress" in one step, but the others do. I can't remember how well they clean though, because I always clean tires separately and dress them afterwards. Personally I'm skeptical how good this cleaning ability could be since you don't rinse or wipe this stuff off...