I picked up (4) Work VS-XX wheels a couple of weeks ago with the intent of refinishing them. Pulled all 36 x 4 = 144 assembly bolts from the wheels and have ordered from Germany, new 7mm x 1.0 flange nuts. The bolts seem to be fine. Removed the centers and used a sharp box knife to score the silicone barrel sealant. The barrels came apart without any heat needing to be applied. [/IMG] I put together a quick assembly to make it a little easier to polish the wheel lips. A 1" shaft , shaft flange and flange bearing screwed to a 18" x 1/4 aluminum disc that attached to the bed of my mill. The first lip I polished to a mirror finish but ended up with a satin finish that I like better. Satin finish. Fitted with the old centers. I'll be sending the centers out to the powder coaters sometime next week.
For some reason the images are not coming up on my iMac or my Windows 7 HP using Firefox, latest version. Hummmm. Would like to view the WIP progress.
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIHbtPWV3ZA]George Thorogood & The Destroyers - The Fixer (30th Anniversary Tour - 2005) - YouTube[/ame]
Hecks yes. Those are going to look killer. Subscribed! Who is PowderCoating them? Sounds like a lot of places are many weeks out on it, except maybe Wheel Medic. I think they are like a week out. Performance PC is like 4 weeks out.
Streetwerkz on Clara next to the fairgrounds is doing it. The bottleneck is me, not the powder coater. It's been just too dang hot and humid out in the shop. If I'm out there more than and hour working on these babies, I'm drenched..... I dropped the faces off yesterday after work. So, the old paint is going to be stripped off and prepping for the P/C.
Faces will be Argento with a gloss clear. Lips will be my satin aluminum with a gloss clear. Barrels with be a semi gloss black for brake dust....
Sounds good. Had to search "Argento color" Go ahead and just search "Argento".... no colors come up lol. Wasnt a bad search though!
No secret.... It's all about how perfect the surface needs to be. Obviously the smoother the surface, the more the surface reflects light. A mirror finish would naturally reflect more light than a surface that is broken up with lots of small peaks and valleys. The peaks and valleys are created by dragging the sand paper across the aluminum surface if seen with a magnifying lens..... This causes the reflected light to be scattered. The good thing with the scattered light is it tends to minimize surface defects. In my case, these wheels have been on the receiving end of rocks and grit just from being used. The sandpaper is just being used to dress up the surface. Using my rigged up "potters wheel", I start out with 100 grit sandpaper for 10 minutes, then 180 grit sandpaper for 10 minutes, followed by a 3M medium grit surface conditioning pad for.... you guessed it, 10 minutes. So in about 30 minutes, the lips are finished with a satin finish. If I didn't have my rig and I was to do this by hand the look would be completely different because short back and forth sanding strokes on a circular rim would give an inconsistent finish. The trick is the spinning wheel on the mill. I'm running it at 1,200 rpm's and it's putting a very consistent and even pattern on the aluminum, much like the circular grooves on a LP record..... only much finer. The effect is fine satin finish that sort of reflects light like a very fine Fresnel lens so to speak. The first lip I did had a high gloss finish.... Didn't like it very much... Some of the old Fuchs wheels that were used on the 1980's Porsche had a similar satin look.
Ummmmm.... Well.... Ahhhhh..... Here is Argento on some vehicle out of Yurop.... Heh Heh Heh It' somewhat similar to Dark Silver, you might say....
Argento faces going into the oven a few minutes ago... The camera flash is bringing out the metalic in the coating on the one on the right....