Thread resurrection...
The rear quarterlight window trim on the A8 is well known for going milky, mine was bad, so bad it looked white with the odd mottled bit of aluminium shining through and has been like this since I bought the car. I suspect someone has washed the car with neat TFR at some point in time and left it on too long which caused the damage. I had made several attempts to clean it but to no avail, a search on the net reveals there are two options. 1. Strip off the anodising with over cleaner or caustic soda and polish to a bright shine with Autosol (or similar). The only problem with this is the alloy is now open to the environment and will quickly turn black, therefore re-polishing on a regular basis would be necessary, you could apparently give it a coat of lacquer but if the water got into it again it would look worse than it does milky. Then there is option 2. Buy new trim, but only go down this route if you have a lottery win and are prepared to spend a lot of your blood sweat and tears removing and refitting as it's a pig of a job.
I decided to try and remove some of the marks by polishing with my usual National Products 'A Grade Polish' which I've happily been using for more than 16 years now
(details & website here) you can buy it on eBay for £7.50 for a 750ml bottle (
LINK HERE)
I started by masking the paintwork and rubber seals (A grade polish should not mark your rubber bits as it contains no powder) then with a microfibre cloth I stood rubbing and rubbing and rubbing for a couple of hours (I need to get a life) The end results have not removed all the marks but it is a massive improvement on what it started off as.
Sadly no before pictures but you can just about make out in this picture how bad the trim was
I might give it another go and try to get a better finish, but this is the end results after hours of work.
