Refinishing Wheels..

Hey guys,

Getting a set of wheels tomorrow or Saturday… They will be my only set now, and will be used year-around… They’re currently spray-canned gunmetal, but they were previously black… They’re 1320’s Saab wheels… I will have these on my car, which is a daily-driver, but I want them to be as nice as possible… Would the best way to do this be to get them sand-blasted and powder-coated…? If so, where’s a good, reasonably priced place to do this…? Any idea on an approximate cost of it…? They’ll probably still have the tires on them, but they’ll be fully masked and ready to go… I want to do either low-gloss or flat black…

Thanks…!

AMF can’t have tires on them

I have no problem spending the money to get it professionally done, but can I get a similar result by just taking my time and doing it with that wheel paint that you can buy…? I’ve painted a car before, so I have a general idea of how to paint something…

…AMF? lol.

AMF is the best powdercoating establishment in the Greater Pittsburgh area. Just search “powdercoating” and you’ll find nothing but great reviews. IMO painting wheels is a complete waste of time and money.

http://www.amfcoatings.com/

If you scrolled down about 5 threads, you would have seen this:

http://pittspeed.com/forums/showthread.php?t=48049

instead of hitting the “New Topic” button.

I saw it. I was asking a GENERAL question so I posted a GENERAL thread.

I was mostly asking if I should get it professionally done or do it myself. And basically how much something like that would cost.

K THX.

lol. This place is right down the road from me and I’ve never heard of them… So you can’t have tires on when doing this? Interesting. I’ll need to wait until I get tires then… It doesn’t outrightly show costs… Any ballparks…?

Can’t leave the tires on… they spray powder on the wheel and bake them in a big oven… the tires don’t like that.

Hmm. Guess I didn’t think about the bake… Well I emailed them to get an price ballpark. Funny that this place is right by me… Well they’re gunmetal right now, so they’ll probably stay that way, then go from there. I will need to see how the tires look and yada yada… If they need replaced anyway, I’ll do it then. Thanks guys.

So no search, and you did whatever you were going to do anyway? Great fucking reason to start a new thread. Seriously, wheel refinishing has NEVER been discussed in all the innerwebs.

Wow. Dickhead much?

So I emailed the guy at AMF and he said to just bring them in without tires, and it’d be between 200-250 out the door for whatever I need. Sounds good to me. Thanks for the suggestion!

Stupid much? Ask a redudndant question, off-the-wall responses are in order.

Jason at AMF will blast them before he does anything (specify bead/media/etc) so you don’t have to any prep work. A word of caution though…if these are intended for track use tell him NOT to powdercoat the back face of the wheel. It will get hot enough to remelt to the disc hub.

No, these most likely never will… But good suggestion… Something for me to think about… What would you do in that case…? Just generically spray it with grill paint or something…? That’s what I did for a muffler casing before… Worked just fine…

For track, since they take a beating and generally aren’t pretty…I think it’s more cost-effective to spray paint. Think rocks, rubber pieces, extreme brake dust and super high temps…touch 'em up every so often and you’re good.

Very true. IF the time comes, I’ll probably score another set of wheels (the ones in question now are some Saab/BBS’s) for cheap of the same size and just get a track-only wheel-set… Then I can just re-spray them every few events… I DO want to do a few SOLO-II meets this year… Been wanting to do that forever… I’m going back to stock size wheels, so I won’t affect my class placement…

That’d work fine. For track…functionality > *

Absolutely. Hell, I can even get some of those dorky looking Saab Viking wheels… Those three spoke ones. lol. They’re supposed to be really light… Just spray them flat black and no-one will care how dorky looking they are…

PM me with the size wheel and I will get you a price.

Powder Coating will hold up in alot of applications. You would need to get the parts north of 450 degrees to start to melt the cured coating.