I spent the past two days trying to clean up my wheels (well, the first two of them). One of them is more or less okay, and I started on a second one yesterday, then all day today. Whatever they’re coated in, it’s really tough stuff. Aircraft stripper doesn’t do much at all – doesn’t even bubble up. I used furniture stripper today, which sort of works, although the coating re-deposits & turns into sticky stuff that can’t even be sanded. It's like Teflon, only way tougher. I ended up doing the stripper 5 times to get the majority of the coating off.
What is interesting is the wheels were obviously lathe-turned, with a coarse cut, leaving a surface like a record. This gives a kind of prismatic effect which, when new, was probably quite attractive. Not so much anymore, with the clear coat mottled & pitted, with corrosion underneath. What makes it so tough to sand is that the surface was never smooth to start with. The grooves are about .1 mm wide, and .1 mm deep. Run your fingernail across them & it makes a zoomy noise, just like a record (for those of us old enough to remember vinyl!).
Interestingly, the aluminum itself seems to also be hard-anodized under the clear coat. It’s certainly harder than aluminum oxide wet/dry paper which, even when used wet, just wears out without even making a scuff. There are hundreds of little pits and scratches which weren’t visible under the clear coat, so the entire wheel has to be sanded down to the depth of the deepest pits. It’s going to be a loooong process.
I’ve given up trying to find replacement wheels. Mine are Ford 4-bolt pattern (4X108 mm), with a 15 mm offset. The very few that are available have a 30mm offset, which wouldn’t work with my fenders, fender stays, etc. (they’d all have to be re-made from scratch, using a different design). The only option would be to use 15 mm wheel spacers – over ½” – which I’m loathe to do. So, I guess I’m stuck with doing what I can with the ones I have.
It's going to be a long grind. I looked into having them polished locally, but at $300 per wheel it's not do-able...I could have brand new wheels, custom-drilled, for close to that.
Anyway, I've come up with a couple of options, and I'd like to have the opinions of you good folks here.
The first pic is of the one wheel I've done (mostly...still days of sanding & polishing to do on it), a clean-but-unpolished wheel. The second pic shows a blind artist's vague interpretation of a paint option that would entail a lot less work than my current path. There is also the third option, that of doing a satin finish on the spokes, and just mirror-polishing the rims.
Anyway on to the pics.
You'll have to pardon my artistic...um...er..."skills" - I don't have Photoshop, just an ancient version of Paint Shop Pro, which has none of the former's automated processes.
Still, if you put up the pic, stand back a few feet from your monitor, put on your old glasses from when you were a kid, and squint juuuuust right, I think you'll see where I was going with the pics.
Pic 1 -Comparison of one of the untouched wheels & a partially polished one. Note that both wheels have scrupulously clean finishes, so what you see is the actual finish (not crud). You can see what I'm up against. Every single fleck you see is a pit, scratch, or corroded rough spot, and the whole surface will have to be sanded down to the level of the deepest ones, if I go for a full mirror polish.
Attachment:
wheels 1 small.jpg
Pic 2 -Option 2 (with painting), polished rims & satin, or flat black, spokes:
Attachment:
wheels black option 2 small.jpg
Finally, there's Option 3 (mirror polished rim, satin-buffed spokes):
Attachment:
Wheels buffed option small.jpg
Of course, there's always the option of painting the entire wheels, but I'm determined to have polished rims, at least. It's an old-school look that I love, and it would be more "period correct" than all black, for example.
I asked my wife, but she said "Oh no, you're not getting ME roped into giving an opinion on that!"
What say you?
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Scratch building, at continental-drift speed, a custom McSoreley-design framed, dual-Weber 45DCOE carburated, Zetec-engined, ridiculously fast money pit.
http://zetec7.webs.com/
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