I bought these old Audi A4 / A6 wheels for a good price and either thought about selling them on or giving them a quick tart up.
As a prelude to this a quote of Parkinsons Law is quite apt as I never intended to go this far with this project;
Work expands to fill the time available for its completion; the thing to be done swells in perceived importance and complexity in a direct ratio with the time to be spent in its completion.
Read the above and have a good think about how far you want to go with a project like this.
I didn't and quickly reached the point of no return, I was committed ! So any wise-guy comments, yeh yeh, I know.
These are the wheels are they stood when I bought them. They are nothing special, they are 16" diameter 7" wide with an ET of 45.
The worse one of which.
Anyway, I thought it would be a good idea to use some paint stripper;
Skulls and Crossbones a picture of a hand melting, this is proper stuff, like the stuff you used to be able to buy years ago that actually worked. This stuff contains a goodly amount of Dichloromethane. Nitomorse used to contain lots but the current 'health and safety' compliant DIY version is useless. At this stage you can choose to give your wheels a light sand or go hardcore and get the stripper out. The stripper is mental stuff and will burn you so be careful.
Below a series of action shots of "Me and the Stripper" in action;
Anyway, have fun sanding or stripping.
The wheels with the faces stripped below. I should have stopped there but no I carried on, remember Parkinsons law above?
Tyres off now and more stripping;
Once I was happy with the stripping it was wire brush time. No ordinary wire brush though, I used a cup brush in a mini angle grinder. In fact I ended up wearing two cup brushes out. The wheels though are are ready for paint with the front face and the rim seal area back to bear metal. I simply gave the back and inner a quick rub down.
At this stage you will have either stripped back the paint or sanded the damage out. If your sanding, then use course grades of paper and work through to finer grades, the aim is to feather out and edges. when feathering, a 10mm feather per coat of paint should be enough.
As I need to paint the whole wheel, I had to devise a way of being able to flip the wheel and rest it without disturbing the paint.
For the front face, it is easy, use an old paint pot. For the back it is a bit trickier. Pictures below show what I did. It is a bit 6"x2" timber where I marked the wheelbolt locations by holding the wood to the backface of the wheel and marking the position (note I had two goes at this). I drilled the wood and then wound some old suspension bolts into the holes (I knew all those old bolts would comme in handy one day). If your jusr doing the front face, then just use a paint pot.
The paint.
I used standard 1k cellulose paint as a DIY'er. There are 2k paints available but they WILL kill you unless you have an air fed mask etc. You can also use aerosols with equally good results, two pics below are of a Ford wheel I did a few years ago using rattle cans just to show it can be done.
So the paint, I got mine form alloy paints.com and I bought enough to do about three to four sets of wheels)
Acid etch primer, very importasnt on bare aluminium or magnesium, if you don't use it the paint tends to fall off !
Pics below of the wheels in acid etch primer!
Also a few pics to show what I do with regards to the mating surface of the wheel to hub. A circle of card held down with a heavy socket!
Normal primer, two coats for me. I personally don't bother to flat (lightly sand) the primer but you can if you wish, read up on this and make your decision.
Base / Colour coat, I chose a high / bright German oem silver.
For now job done, I'm going to let the celly basecoat paint 'go-off' for a few days before I apply the laquer. I am using a 2k laquer but an isocyanate free one (it won't kill you). If you are using rattle cans you could carry on and get things finished. DON'T FORGET YOUR FACE MASK !
I'll update this (this weekend) when I've done the laquer and polished the finished wheels up.