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.