TOOLS AND SUPPLIES
Saturday Afternoon Wheel Makeover Shabby wheels get a fresh look with a little elbow grease and paint
WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY MIKE McNESSOR
The fashionistas will tell you that shoes, not clothes, make the man. We can neither confirm nor deny
that around here, but we can attest to the
fact that the wheels make the car.
Beat paint, shabby interior, dull trim,
suddenly all of those offenses seem less
egregious when you bolt on a shiny set of
wheels and fresh tires.
We had these 16-inch 1994-ish Mustang
wheels lying around that had, at some
point in their lives, received a very quick
and poorly executed facelift. It appeared
that they had been media blasted and
then fogged with the thinnest coat of
paint in human history. As a result, they
were porous, and all of those little pores
became tiny caves for brake dust parti-
cles to hang out in.
This is what the wheels looked like
after we soda-blasted them. We
left the tires like that for a while,
hoping to tell someone that we’d just
returned from yet another record-
setting trip to Bonneville. Nobody
asked. Probably because they’re
snow tires, for Pete’s sake.
Permatex sent us this little kit to try,
complete with sandpaper, rubber
gloves, a small can of wheel paint
and some filler for fixing nicks and
scratches. We didn’t use it because
our wheels were in good shape. But
it’s available, and the Dupli-Color
paint it comes with appears to be the
same stuff we used.
First we hit the wheels with 220-
grade paper dry, until a dull haze
developed.
Next we blew off the dust with a little
compressed air.
We picked up a 320-grade 3M
sanding sponge from the auto parts
store and sanded with it wet, rinsing
it out as it plugged up. It didn’t take
long before the wheels felt smooth
enough to paint. After sanding, we
wiped off the film with a clean rag.
Eastwood recently sent us some of
their Pre paint prep to try out. Use
it as a wax and grease remover to
clean off dirt, oil, wax, etc., prior to
painting.
We taped up the valve stems with
3M Scotch-Blue Painter’s Tape. We
didn’t bother masking off the tires
because we were replacing them
anyway.
This is what the wheels looked like
after three coats of the Dupli-Color
High Performance Wheel Coating
and three coats of the Dupli-Color
clear. The finish didn’t seem as
heavy as the original factory coating,
but it was far and away an improvement over the paint it replaced.
