Plug Bug: Wheel Selection
My rims started out like this, with a bunch of rust on the sides and white painted part:
I thought it wouldn’t be too hard to clean them up, but I was wrong! After some rust removing and stripping, I tried cleaning one up and almost decided it was pointless. There was just so much rust and it would take forever. I played around with photoshop dropping in the white wall tires with various rims that I could buy. Here are some EMPI 8 spoke GT wheels, white I like quite a bit, but don’t 100% go with the classic white wall look.
I’m already committed to the white walls, since I already bought them, so I figured I’d do some more stripping and rust removing on the original rims to get them up to some better condition. Heck — I can easily buy new rims anytime later, should I choose. Here I am thinking about painting the center rims red:
So, after more work of stripping, rust removing, and sanding I got the rims cleaned up quite nice.
I decided to powder coat the back half to make it more durable. In hindsight, I probably could have powdercoated the whole thing and used that as primer for the red; however, I would have still had to shoot some gray primer as a base color for the red.
Here’s the prepared rim:
Then shot with gloss black powder:
And after baking for ~25 minutes:
Fast forward a bit with two coats of gray primer (sanding between coats), two coats of the same red as the car, and two clear coats and we have:
Then I got them mounted on the wheels and they look great!
I just ordered a new set of hub caps; two of the old ones are dented, and I wanted some of the “dome” ones.
Hey, look real good – – are you getting the vw hubcaps