Oh bother..new use for Pledge.

[Beauregards Ultra]

Ah, you gotta love twelve year old boys. At this age they're just discovering mechanical things and questioning how things work. Taking things apart and trying to reassemble them, modifying things and painting things. Many a boys bicycle has undergone major customizations due to this. Sounds like you've got a potential future gear head there and that's a good thing. Give an old broken power tool with the cord cut off and some basic tools and let him take the whole thing apart. Start showing him the proper way to use screwdrivers, wrenches and sockets. Maybe in a few years he'll be turning his own wrenches on a clapped out Sporty. At any rate you both will laugh about this someday.

As mentioned above, some thinner on a rag will do the trick then wax over the top.

 

[ballpeen]

Boy can I relate to this one.......... I had a similar problem, not from a little boy but from by grown up wife, I was on a construction site last winter staying in a hotel because it was a ways from home. I get a call from my sweetie the art teacher, it went as follows, : Ive got a question for you, OK? how would I remove the sparkley stuff in alluminum paint form something that I did not want to get paint on?? OH NO..... why ? what did you get paint on?? Well I was spraying paint in the shop because it was to cold outside on some of the kids picture frames...... MAN PLEASE DONT TELL Me ,, your kidding right??? Well I had a fan blowing the paint to the far side of the shop...... You mean where the Harley is on the lift??????????? Yes thats right!!!!! Well by this point I could feel my heart beating in my neck,,,,,, so I said, how bad is it??? She says,, well............. really.......... Ummmmmmmmm, Yea its pretty bad. Needless to say, when I got home it was just as you described, I used WD-40 with cotton rags, and yes a clay bar, then used lacquer thinner on all of the chrome,, took me the whole weekend, but I must say it looked like it had been detailed when I got done. Anyway theres light at the end of the tunnel for you, Good Luck,,, Tim

 

[mattmuir]

Yep I have future gearheads. My 15 yr old tears apart his 250 4-wheeler and the young painter pulls the spark control out of the pipe on the dirt bike to make it sound cool. They both paint everything. At the end of the day this will let the bike get cleaner than it would have much sooner.