Painted stock 2008 sport wheels

After years of salt air and neglect I finally decided to do something about my wheels. This is what they looked like a couple of months ago..

In some places the brake dust and dirt embedded into the clear coat of the painted areas and corrosion caused a lot of areas to bubble up and chip off.
I really don’t have too much spare time to work on all the wheels at once so this was a slow process. I started by taking off one wheel at a time, repainting the brakes and cleaning the wheels with an acid soap spray solution. ( borrowed a bottle of it from a neighbor and didn’t get the actual name of it) it worked really good..

But it didn’t get the brake dust stains off the front of the wheels. I figured I might as well try to polish up the machined surface so I needed to remove the clear coat. I ended up using a paint stripper in an aerosol can. I carefully sprayed the wheels trying not to hit the painted areas in the spokes (I didn’t want chunks of paint missing which would make the sanding and prep more difficult). The clear coat melted off almost instantly and I used mother’s aluminum polish,a cordless drill and small buffing pads to shine up the machined surface. After hours of sanding from course to fine grit the wheel was ready for masking and paint.

I used fine line tape to mask up the lines as clean as I could and then 2” tape the rest of the way..

Masking one wheel took about 35 minutes. I primed with an etching primer to make sure the corrosion has a hard time coming back and then went with a high heat primer over that.

I then sprayed a silver over the small indentions on the spokes and let that dry up. Once it was dry I masked them up and went with dupli colors graphite wheel paint.

I was very happy with the color of the graphite paint. I didn’t want to go too dark with the color and this was just what I had in mind.

Since I was off from work today I was able to install these powerstop drilled and slotted rotors with new brake pads. Also, Prepped and painted the front wheels ( about 8 hours of work ).

Very glad I did it this way instead of painting the whole wheel...