As some of you have known that I have been doing my “wheel business” for a while. It took indeed long time on finding rims, collecting tires, selling tires, and so on… I think it’s been 6 or 8 weeks.
Finally it’s all settled, and I think it’s nice to share this experience with you guys. Of course you can use it as a DIY guide if you want J
BUT, I STRONGLY suggest NOT TO DO THIS, unless you have no friends to hang out with during weekends, or really want a challenging “work out” physically and mentally.
Alright, here we go.
1) The original wheels with dirt and a lot curb rashes :(
2) Clean the dirt
3) Slightly sand the surface around curb rashes
4) Use paint thinner to remove the grease and a bit old clear paint
5) Use some filler to fill the curb damages. I used epoxy putty, my god this thing stinks and hard to handle, better use something else :(
6) Remove the extra putty before sanding
7) Sand the fixed surface until it becomes smooth
8) Phew…
9) Ready to sand the whole surface down. I tried wire brush to do a coarse sanding. But later I found it’s not a good idea, as your arms got tired it’s hard to control and I got some deep scratches :(
10) Start…
11) Fine sanding and edge sanding with sand paper, MANUALLY… :(
12) Finally it’s ready for coating.
13) Tape and mask the area you don’t want to paint
14) First of first, twice filler primer
15) Twice color coating…. Still going ….
16) Twice clear coating… phew… coating finished here.
17) Another pic with flash on
18) It’s ready to get them mounted. I decided to do caliper painting and differential oil change along with it. But I dropped the differential oil change later, as I think there’s a leak and I have to get it checked first
19) Un-mount the wheels and spray some break cleaner to remove the dirt and grease on the caliper
20) Do a further clean and sand the surface a bit. ( compare to wheel sanding, this is just a piece of cake :) ) Mask the break disc, as I don’t want to paint the disk
21) Ready to paint :)
22) Detail painting with brushes.
23) Another pic
24) The caliper paint is so so so thin, I had to paint each caliper three times. This becomes time consuming but it gave you better result. Here it is.
25) With old wheels
26) With “new” wheels and caliper
27) Different angle
28) Close look
29) Make sure you have all the protection on during the work :)
Hope you enjoy this :)
