My Winter Wheel Refinishing V2.0

[acolella76]

So last year about this time I bought a set of BBS RA 452's for cheap and decided to make them dedicated track and autocross wheels. So since I wasn't going to be using them in the winter I decided to go ahead and refinish them while they were waiting for some brand new Toyo R888's to get mounted.

The thread can be found here



They went from this:



To this:






This years project is a set of 15x8 Rota Slipstreams that a friend is asking me to refinish for him. He uses these wheels as autocross wheels and since it is the off season he thought he might as well make these all pretty :) Going to strip them completely and polish the faces and make them nice and shiny.

Here's what I have to work with:





Should be a fun little project, I will keep you guys updated :)

[FunfGan]

In for shiny :D

[acolella76]

The shiny is on its way! Took a wire wheel to the wheels and it stripped the paint in seconds! Used a finer wire wheel to get rid of the scratches left by the first and it looked polished already! There was some pitting on the spokes (stupid rota cheapness lulz) that I will have to sand down before polishing.

[Jand3rson]

Those BBS you did look awesome, those were just stock Jetta wheels, right?

[acolella76]

Those BBS you did look awesome, those were just stock Jetta wheels, right?

Thanks! Yeah I'm pretty sure, I've seen a lot of Jettas and older Toyota Camrys () with those wheels

[Nygdup]

I hope your friend pays you for the work you are doing.

[acolella76]

Oh he is ;)

[acolella76]

Didn't make any huge progress, still just stripping all of the paint off. I took a few pics of the pitting on the spokes and then sanded the spoke with 400grit sand paper, dry first then wet.





And after 400 grit

[CW325]

they're coming out really good. i hated striping the paint of my bcaps, good luck with your project!

[DrLeadFoot]

Subscribed.

[Nygdup]

Nice!

[Threehz]

Hey man, saw your first wheels in your other build thread, wicked car and the wheels came out so sick. I'm about to refinish my wheels as well and I'm wondering how you go about stripping them. Obviously the wirewheel sounds good, but I got some talstrip and was planning on using that to get the old paint off, looks like you used some type of paint stripper before and a just a metal scraper, that work well?

[acolella76]

they're coming out really good. i hated striping the paint of my bcaps, good luck with your project!

Man I hear bcaps are a pain, I have a friend who's trying to polish his lol. Good luck!

Nice!

Thanks BRO

Hey man, saw your first wheels in your other build thread, wicked car and the wheels came out so sick. I'm about to refinish my wheels as well and I'm wondering how you go about stripping them. Obviously the wirewheel sounds good, but I got some talstrip and was planning on using that to get the old paint off, looks like you used some type of paint stripper before and a just a metal scraper, that work well?

Thanks for the kind words! I used paint stripper just to get as much paint off as I can. And that stuff burns like hell so I just used a scraper to scrape the stripped paint off, which worked kind of well to get it close to bare metal. There is a layer of what I'm guessing is powder coating, which paint stripper doesn't remove easily, so that's where the wire wheel comes in handy!

[acolella76]

Got the first wheel about 99% stripped. I don't have a wire wheel that can get into those tight spaces so I'm either going to sand it by hand or if they make a good size wire wheel I'll just use that.

Washed the wheel down to get all the dust/stripper off. Look how much shinier that one spoke is than the rest, and that's only with 400 grit! Can't wait till I get to 2000 :)



Been wanting a set of 16x8 polished slipstreams for a while now. Just wanted to see what they would look like on my car... might have to do a proper test fit when they're done. ;)

[Click]

Beadblast the hard to get areas?