How To: Paint your wheels

How-to's for the Seca II's cosmetics, including detailing, paint, bodywork, fairings and seat reupholstry
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ride92
XJOTM July 2013
XJOTM July 2013
Posts: 1257
Joined: Tue Dec 20, 2011 3:58 pm
Location: Menomonee Falls, WI

How to: Paint Your Wheels

I wrote this in my project thread but thought I should make it's own thread for it so it might be easier for other to find it for future reference. It's not the only way to paint a wheel, it's just one that I have used several times and have gotten good results with. Enjoy.

Before I started the masking and the painting I used some super clean degreaser 50/50 mixed with water in a spray bottle to spray down and get all the oil and grime off the wheel (any degreaser will work your goal is to get the wheel as clean as possible). I used a number of different scrub brushes for the first cleaning and finished with a good scrubbing with an abrassive scouring pad to rough up the surface a bit to help with paint adhesion. I rinsed everything real well with the hose and used an old towel to dry it off most of the way. After it was all the way dry I wiped the whole rim down with some alcohol and let then dry before I started masking it off.

Now I've seen other on here mask of the tire from the rim with tape by placing small peices of tape and trying to push them down between the rim and the tire. This, I imagine takes a long time to do. So....I have a better solution. I learned this trick years ago while painting rims for a truck i had. Take a deck of cards or some heavy card stock, I had old price signage laying around for scratch Paper, and wedge them between the tire and the rim. Deflate the tire as much as possible to make the tazk easyier! Over lap the cards so there's no gaps at the top.

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Do this to both sides of the rim. When you flip it over make sure your on a flat somewhat clean surface and the cards will just "fan" out. Next take some masking tape and tape the cards from one side to the other. I started at the seams on one side and just went to where ever on the other. If you want you could make sure you insereted the cards so the seams line up better, but it's not nessasary.

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By taping them down it makes it easyier to get paint into the area between the rim and the cards. You can see that when the cards are bent down from the masking tape it leaves just enough room to get paint in there if you spray from the outside towards the middle.
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I guess I should add that before you spray everything you should mask off the nessesary areas. I just happened to have a random cap to something laying around that worked great to cover the center.

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I used four spent spray cans from my painting to act as a pedistal to place under the tire part so that the freshly painted rim wasn't touching the ground when flipped over to do the other side, some 2x4's would work well too. I sprayed three generous coats on each side which used up almost the entire can. If you did lighter coats you could probably get four per side. Here is the final result:

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Pull the masking off and take the cards out of the rim by pushing the tire sidewall in a bit like you did when you installed them. If you sprayed right, from the outside towards the center all the way around you should have a rim edge that looks like this:

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Here's a shot of the completed rim all painted wearing it's new sexy black dress!!! :Mozarkrider:

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You could use any color you wanted to paint the rim. I chose not to clear coat this but if you did the wheel would have a much glossier finish to it. Hope this helps some of you in your wheel painting endevours!!!!
Check out my build of "Project Sonar": viewtopic.php?f=12&t=3048

"'Having somebody help you doesn't mean you failed, it just means you're not in it alone."

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