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Just got new tires in the mail from tirerack today and I’ve been thinking about painting the rims before getting them put on.
As it is my car has the standard steel wheels that come with hubcaps but I lost a few some time ago and been driving it with all hubcaps off.
The wheels have a bit of wear and uneven color and I’d like to give them a uniform black coat. I searched youtube and came up with some semi-professional type approaches and some very ghetto approaches. I’m looking for a straight forward simple diy method including what type of paint and clearcoat to use if any.
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Well start off with giving them a good clean with brake clean or another rim cleaning product to remove all brake dust and just scrub them to remove the caked on brake dust.
Then use a high heat paint product and also use metal based primer beforehand.
Here’s what I did when I painted the steel wheels that came on my Subaru. I work at a tire shop, so I took all the wheel weights, the tires and the valve stems off of the wheels before I got started, but you could just as easily mask off the parts that you don’t want to get paint on.
Using a stiff-bristled plastic brush, some very hot water and some generic spray cleaner, I cleaned all the dirt and accumulated scrunge off of the outside face of the wheels. After using compressed air to dry them, I set them on some stacks of junk tires with the valve stem holes at the 12 o’clock position. I used some high temp gray primer on all the wheels, turning them 180 degrees after 3 coats. In all, all four wheels got 6 coats of primer, which worked out to right about a can and a half I think. After the primer was dry, I repeated the painting process with Dupli-Color Metal-Cast paint, blue in my case. I think I went through two and a half cans of blue paint before I was done. After that was completely dry (I let the wheels sit in the sun for most of the day) I put new valve stems back in, remounted the wheels and then balanced everything. This is my winter set of wheels, so they only get used in cold, nasty weather and the paint is holding up just fine. I wound up painting the grill on my car the same color as the wheels.
When I get around to painting my summer set of wheels, I’ll take pictures of the whole process and post up a How-To on what I used and how I did it. I’m not sure when that’s going to be though, with the weather being as cold as it is right now, spray paint doesn’t work so well.
I painted a set of rusty old rims this summer. I wire brushed and sanded and used muriatic acid to clean them. I found out later that a 10-1 ratio of water to molasses would have been more effective and not nearly as nasty!
Regardless, the important thing to do is to make sure you degrease the rims, make sure you have a non glossy surface, use a good primer and paint and they’ll turn out good. I used Rustoleum paint in a can and sprayed my rims with my Wagner power painter. Put on a nice thick coat of paint and then I ran a heater next to them for a couple of days due to the thickness of the paint. This is the first winter I’m running them, so only time will tell how they hold up.
Quality paint means a quality paint job, but bad prep will make the best paint in the world fail. You can buy a wipe on deglosser if the paint is in good shape but needs to be scuffed down due to gloss if you don’t feel like rubbing the rims down by hand or having them sandblasted, etc.
i have pics of the rims i paint on my mustang (in my profilr garage pics) they were 2006 bullit gt rims they were grey painted them black with dupla-color rim paint in a spray paint can and dupla-color clear coat i just taped off tire and chrome lip sanded down the rims washed and cleaned them then started painting did 3-4 coats of black and 3-4 coats of clear and let cure for a few days before i drove on them held up great for 2 years before i upgraded to 2011 gt rims but all in all cost me a weekend of light labor and about $25-30 bucks in the paint
oh nevermind found how to put before during and after pics on here
If you want a professional look consider getting them powder coated, otherwise some good quality paint will clean them up.
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