OK, so 18 years of faithful service to our roads has rendered my stock GXL's wheels extremely dull. Ive seen other people here that have painted their wheels black and i thought it looked rather nice, it would go well with my black trim. SO im going to attempt to paint them, but the question is i dont exactly know how to go about it.
I was thinking of using some sort of an acid product to deep clean them and then just spray paint away.
This a good idea?
What sort of a product would i need to clean them and what type of paint would i use?

Anyone else who has done this (successfully ) please let me know!

Thanks
Sam

 

run, the rice police are coming!!

 

if this helps you any, defprun (if you remember him before he got banned) painted his gunmetal, and i asked him how he did it:

Yeah they're mine. I got a set of rough-*** gxl rims for free with fresh tires on them. I decided I was going to polish them, but, doing that would have taken a hel of a long time. Especially with hand tools. So what I did was make the surface of the metal as smooth as possible, starting with a coarse wire brush mounted on a drill and than moving on to a finer brush. That i just sanded down most of the rim using various tools, going from 80 grit to get rid of most of the porisity in the aluminum and than to 220, and i finish it up with 400. This makes the surface of the rim look flawless at least with paint on it.

The rim around the outside is really tough to get at with what I have for polishing tools, so, in that picture, all I used was a fine wire brush, so it isnt a mirror finish at all...but still better looking than the curb bent, dented up rim that it was. The wire brush left an even finish so it is kindof shiny. I'm going to attempt to hand-polish the rim using some sandpaper until i get a dremel or something to help me out.

For the paint all I used was some rattle cans...one coat of tremclad primer for galvanised metal, two coats of flat black tremclad paint and than a coat of tremclad gloss clearcoat. It gives the rim a neat off-black gunmetal appearance and its pretty damn nice! When you put on the clear coat, dont be alarmed if it leaves little speckles on the finish, they will fade away mostly while it dries.

To keep the rim from getting any paint on, i just masked it off, the gxl rims look like two-piece rims, so theres a seperation between the spokes and the rim, so its rather easy to get masking tape in there, and it wont LOOK like it was masked off..almost like it was meant to be this way!

 

Hmm well thank you for the advice, although the rice police comment was definately unnecessary.

 

I'd like to see pictures of how it turns out.

 

^ yeah me too.

but I have to say, reading the writeup I thought, "And he said polishing would take too long?" lol.

anyway, yeah good luck. I always like to see people make stock wheels look different and good.

 

if youre going to take the tires off, get the rims powder coated. Lots of nice colors and the gloss is great and durable!

 

powdercoat them. it totally worth it. I got mine done for 35 each. that included sandblasting and painting.