Refinishing wheels

[Crazy_pilot]

This isn’t for my SVX, rather these wheels are going onto my Legacy with snow tires for the winter. The procedure for refinishing applies to everything though, so someone might find it useful down the road.

When I bought my Legacy last month it came with 17” snow tires, but no wheels. Obviously that needed to be addressed, so I started asking the local guys for any decent, cheap wheels for sale. A friend who does a lot of JDM part re-selling came through with a set of V7 STi wheels. Downside was, they were fairly banged up. Still, I’d rather run an OEM wheel than a cheap POS. The wheels had deep gouges on the lip all around and numerous scrapes on the face of the spokes. Still, they were round, true, and structurally sound. And cheap. So I decided to try my hand at refinishing them. Here's an example of the before condition:



The prep cycle I got into was hardcore wash and de-grease, sand and fill the bad gouges (using Bondo Plastic Metal filler), smooth filler, sand small damage down to bare metal to smooth out, scuff the whole wheel, and wash again with dish soap. I used 180 grit on the areas I had to take down, and red scotch brite pads to scuff the wheel surface. This is what they looked like after that:



After primer: (I briefly considered leaving them like this. Pretty bad-ass.)



And after colour/clear. I used the Dupli-Color "High Performance" wheel paint and clear coat. The clear makes a massive difference and gives it a lot of shine. As you can see I didn't put any time into repairing the lip. It would have been a lot of work to take them down far enough to get rid of the scratches, and if I used that much filler I would worry about it being chipped off when the tires are mounted.





If/when I do this again I'll spend more time on the prep work. There were paint chips that I didn't feather out enough, and the 180 sandpaper was too rough for the primer to hide. Both were filled in with paint in the end, but that's not really the ideal way to do things. I've still got my original SVX wheels that I might have a go at next, mostly for fun.

[Blacky]

I had good results with the same paint on my daughters Outback.
Looks good.

[Old Davy]

They look real nice, Chris.

Conversely, now that I have my silver 16" winter alloys on I like the silver on a black car more than I like my 17" graphite summer alloys. For my taste black over black on black is just too Batmobilesque. And 17" looks so much better on a SVX.

So I was planning on having my 17"ers redone in silver for Spring. (or spring for new silver alloys, essentially the same major cost to have them stripped & powder coated professionally). A shame since they are in flawless condition and came with the car but a cost I'm willing to bear for the right look.
Yours came out so nice I'm gonna do the same DIY thing as a winter basement project.

Dave

[Crazy_pilot]

As a heads up, doing this in the basement will stink up the whole house. And you should look into some kind of breathing filter, at least the basic paper ones to keep the particulate matter out of your lungs. I probably took a few years off my life this weekend.

[Old Davy]

Good point. I'll wait until the weather warms up in March/April when I can rattlecan out in the garage or covered porch.

[Conn SVX]

Silver looks better . Not a fan of the bat mobile look. Old school . BITD when we removed the hub caps off our cars the rims were black. BM ( before mags ) I hated the look and painted my rims. Every time I see the black rims it reminds me of BM !