What a major pain in the a$$. I knew it was gonna be a job, but it was way worse than I expected. Prepping them was absolutely TERRIBLE. I was able to get the OEM Paint code for the gold. The wheels were in REALLY tough shape. Clear coat peeling all over, corrosion, etc. They turned out pretty nice for what we started with....


BEFORE......




LIPS POLISHED.........





AND AFTER PAINT......

 

Those turned out great !

 

Wow!

 

Stop raising the bar! LOL Supposed to just not really even tape em off and squirt right over the brake dust and cancer with Krylon. You're making the rest of us look bad.

 

Those look amazing.

Wanna do a set in Bright Red?

 

Thanks for the compliments, fellas!

DynoDave, I'm really not that interested in doing another set any time soon lol. They sucked, soooooo bad!! I even made my own scotch brite tool to use on my drill to get in all of the 100,000 little holes, but still had to do as much work by hand. Then used an etch primer, sealer, basecoat, then clear.

 

Shoulda tried the scratch hi-liter.

 

This picture makes me wonder what a set of these would look like with the centers polished as well.

Those wheels turned out great!

 

Like this........

 

those look really good all polished

 

Great job!

Since wheel rehab is such a popular topic, you might want to post a very detailed list of the materials and procedures you used so that others can follow and get the same good results.

 

Great job dagwood. I need to re-do mine but I haven't found the time. I know its a job ive done a set before but I used single stage instead of basecoat clearcoat but not next time

 

 

Hmmm... my car needs this. Do they sell it by the 5 gallon bucket with a paint roller ?

 

The wheels look great. I have a question. Where the lips of the wheels polished from the factory or did they have a machined finish?

 

Great job!

I polished and cleaned (no paint, it was good) the gold "Snowflake" wheels on my 1979 Trans Am SE ("Bandit") and must have spent 20 hours doing so!

 

looks like they were relatively polished as you can see in this video at 5:05

repaint looks fantastic by the way!

 

From the factory they are a relatively shiny machine finish, and then clear coated over that so they would maintain the shine without having to polish them all the time. On these, the clearcoat was removed from the bare aluminum, and polished a lot to a mirror finish, but I only cleared over the painted part, so they will require a lot more future polishing to keep them looking like they do now

 

Outstanding job, those look awesome.

 

You should have done that to my new 17" mesh wheels

 

It would have been a WHOLE lot easier to paint brand new ones! These things were disgusting lol

 

Fantastic job!

 

Once you polish a set you have to keep on polishing them from then on. Getting them wet dulls em quick. Dagwood those look great you do some good work👍

 

Thanks man! Yeah, they'll require some maintenance, but the car probably wont be driven much.....and more than likely only on top down, sunny days

 

Whoa! I like that. But, there is no way I'm spending that much time on mine! I'll keep them black centered.

As for the polished lips, mine are also polished. I have to re-polish about every 6 months and the car sits outside all of the time. They'll stay shiny quite awhile as long as they are wiped off occasionally.

 

Dagwood - My goal is to make mine impress like yours do. I am about to get started on removing the gold paint (I already removed the clear on the aluminum rims last fall). Did you remove all of the old paint or just smooth it out and scuff before painting over it? Not sure if I want to CC the entire wheel or just the gold paint. Right now, I'll take any advice I can get.

 

I did not remove the old gold. I scuffed it really, really good and then used etch prime before sealing and painting. I only cleared the gold, not the polished part

 

Thanks, Dagwood. I think that I will do the same. My gold just looks old and needs to be refreshed. The rims are holding up well with an occasional hit of Mothers polish after I removed the CC.

 

Trouble with the stock wheels was the clear coating really needed to be waxed regularly just like the paint. Most people would sooner eat healthy and live debt free before waxing wheels. A lot of enthusiasts have entered into a doomed "strip and polish" project with stock wheels that really just needed some TLC like a neglected paint job. The factory clear coating actually responds pretty well to claybar, cleaner wax, wax/polish, etc. Not to say that it can always be saved, but if the coating isn't peeling, I'd recommend trying to save the coating instead of stripping.

 

Well put!

 

the wheels do look great,what are the products/methods you used and what is the exact paint color?(if you don't mind)

 

Man that's a lot of surface prep. I was thinking you just had the painted center blasted, then primed and painted.

 

Thanks! The paint code for the gold is WA9008 and it's called Gold Poly. I only did the paint work, not the polishing. We took the wheels to a place that polishes semi wheels, and they did that part for $55 per wheel. I used red scotch brite to scuff the original gold, mostly by hand, but I used a scotch brite pad on my drill as well to help inside all of the holes. Then sprayed them with wax and grease remover and wiped down, and tacked off. I used 1 coat of PPG SX1071 etch prime first, followed by 1 coat of PPG G5 sealer, then 3 coats of the WA9008 PPG water base basecoat, and 2 coats of PPG EC520 clearcoat. I had them on broom handles on stands so I could spin them as I painted them. For the paint edge, I used 1/4" blue fine line tape for a clean edge.....and just green masking tape from then on, and paper on the inside so no overspray would get in there through the holes. It took about 7.5 hours just to prep and paint the centers.

I could have gotten away with only 2 coats of basecoat, but with all those holes and all the different angles to spray to cover everything, I put on 1 extra coat just to make sure I didnt miss anything

 

Here is the PPG ENVIROBASE formula for the gold....

 

Theres a company called OER that make a third gen wheel paint factory color California gold #691-K89335..
I just had my wheels chemically stripped so I could repaint them an polish them..

 

Yep, I've seen it advertised. I've never seen that paint in person, so I'm not sure how close it is to the real factory color. I compared my mix to the factory gold on these wheels before I started prepping them and it was 100% spot on.

I ended up using $137.00 worth of paint materials. But that was mixing everything on the scale and only paying for what I used. If you didnt already have it and had to buy everything in new, full containers, it would have been SUPER expensive.

You will want to get some kind of adhesion promoter......paint doesn't like to stick to bare aluminum worth a damn

 

There are at least two shades of Gold used by GM.

 

For this particular color I used, the GM color code is 52

 

I've never looked into it much beyond just happening to see at one point or another that there were a couple different shades of Gold used. Mostly just throwing it out there so that someone doesn't come through, see the discussion, get paint mixed, and then get all upset because his repainted wheels don't exactly match the OE color.

Maybe it's only my luck that is so good that I could Google up a paint code and get something painted only to find out after there's some other code. LOL Sometime I'll tell the story about needing a door for a maroon Lumina/Monte Carlo, getting a killer deal on a junkyard pair of doors the same color, then getting them back to the project car and discovering there was more than one shade of Maroon that year. Or the time my buddy got paint mixed to repaint the front clip on a Cavalier he was rebuilding for resale, only to find out Chevy used three shades of bronzish gold that year. Or the 5 cans of Olive Drab Green paint on my shelf that never are the exact shade of whatever ammo can, helmet, or whatever I'm trying to touch up. Seems I never get colors to match.

 

You are correct. Most colors have several variences of the same color. I mixed a Ford color this morning that had 6 variences. But this particular color I used on these wheels was only offered in prime. No variences