P&S Brake Buster | Non-Acid Foaming Wheel & Tyre Cleaner | Coating-Safe
The wheel cleaner that isn't an acid — and why that matters
The fast end of the wheel-cleaner market leans on hydrofluoric acid or ammonium bifluoride. They work, and they work quickly, which is exactly why they sell. What they also do is etch polished lips, dull anodised finishes and eat away at a ceramic coating a little more with every wash. If you have had your wheels coated, feeding them acid every fortnight defeats the reason you paid for it — a coating is a sacrificial layer, and acid is very good at making it sacrifice itself.
Brake Buster is non-acid. It lifts brake dust and road film through surfactant chemistry and a clinging gel rather than through aggression, which is what makes it safe on coated and delicate finishes every week rather than occasionally. P&S built their name supplying American production shops — volume work, several cars a day — and this is the bottle those shops run through fastest.
The pH, honestly
P&S do not publish a pH figure for Brake Buster, so we are not going to quote you one. “Non-acid” is a claim about what is not in it, and it is the claim that matters here: no fluoride chemistry, nothing that etches. Anyone quoting you a precise pH for this product online is reading it off someone else's guess.
How to use it
It works neat or diluted. For regular maintenance P&S state 5:1 — five parts water to one part cleaner — in a spray bottle or foam sprayer. Save full strength for genuine build-up. Work on cool wheels out of direct sun, spray the wheel and tyre generously, agitate with a brush or mitt, then rinse thoroughly until every trace of residue is gone.
P&S rate it safe on painted, powder-coated, bare metal and alloy wheels, and it doubles as a tyre and engine-bay cleaner. It is not an iron remover — baked-on neglect and bonded ferrous fallout are a different job and a different chemistry.
What you're buying
A dilutable wheel cleaner, usable neat, in 473 ml or 3.8 L. At 5:1 the small bottle makes nearly three litres of working solution, so most people are buying the 3.8 L for the shop rather than the house.
Pairing it with a cordless foamer turns it into a proper foamed-on wheel clean without a pressure washer — that is our Wheel Foaming Kit.