How to re paint your alloys

jamesshack

First off this is how I did it, if you have another way that works, or you know a better way please add to this :D

1. find a place to do this
if you don't have a garage your gonna have to improvise but do not do this indoors the fumes and spray dust get everywhere!

2. clean the prep area.
make sure the area you gonna use is 'you could eat off it' clean, dust is the evil ruiner of this project. Paper and mask your work area or plastc sheet it, this stops overspray or spray dust landing on anything you don't want it to.

3. Stuff you gonna need:

1. sandpaper
2. wheel cleaner
3. toothbrush
4. newspaper
5. 1 tin of primer
6. 4 tins of colour
7. 1 tin of clear lacquer
8. microfibre cloths
9. some kind of paint thinners
10. dust mask

If you don’t have a spare set of wheels to sling on then or you have no jack stands your gonna have to use to spacesaver and do this 2 at a time. I would not suggest anyone use bricks.

jack her up put on the saver run round and jack up, Now if you have tyres with specific rotation either mark with chalk like 1,2,3,4 or just remember when your replacing them.
so you got your wheel in front of you have a really good look at what your goona be doing, each wheel will have its own special way of annoying you by showing you little dings and kerbing marks you never knew existed. Or in my case some botched attempt by the previous owner to putty the deep scratches away.
clean it, clean it and clean it, I used Wonder Wheels and loads of clean water and a toothbrush to make em shine. Get into all the hard to reach places with the toothbrush and the dry with a microfiber cloth. Remove the centre cap, this should just pop out if you push it from the inside of the wheel.
sand. Wear a mask! Now after putting up a question about this someone suggested Nitromors. I did try with this stuff but for me it was gonna take ages use loads and I was scared of the claim about it getting on the tyres, since I left my tyres on. So sand, I started with the spokes and worked my way round till the thing was dull as dish water, in some places I wnet a bit far and stripped it right back, but this is unesacery, you need to take the shine of them and give the primer something to grip onto. This takes about an hours a wheel.
now you have a sanded wheel. Use the paint thinners on a microfiber to clean off the dust, when you think you have it all, do it again, its critical there is no dust or dirt anywhere on the surface your gonna spray.
mask off the tyre, take small pieces of tape and place under the rim of the alloy, work your way around until you have a circle of masking tape around the alloy, now do another ring overlapping the first. Now attatch overlapping paper to cover the rest of the tyre.
clean the alloy again.
take your primer and spray on to the alloy, depending of the pattern of your wheel depends on how you do this, just don’t get to close!
wait. While your waiting prep the second wheel
colour spray the first wheel
prime the second
wait. I gave the first 2 an hour after spraying the primer layers, you need two layers of primer 15 minutes apart from each other and wait 1 hour.
2 of colour 15 minutes apart and wait 1 hour.
2 of lacquer 15 minutes apart.

Job done I think…. If I forgot something sorry it’s the fumes…. Any questions let me know