Nice job
What was the process? I could do with doing the alloys on my Focus, the lacquer is peeling on a few of them and looking scruffy.
Fairly straight forward but mega time consuming -
Take wheels off & let all of the air out of the tyres (gives more clearance for an electric sander & makes masking up easier) , the lip round the edge was really badly curbed in places from the previous owner of the wheels so I put some 80 grit paper in an electric sander & took the lip back to bare metal all the way around until it all felt smooth then went over it again with 240 grit.
The bubbled bits I took back to bare metal with a wire drill attachment and then filled them with isopon p38, initial shaping done with 80 grit paper followed by 240. Same story inside the bolt holes pretty much, took the corrosion off with a wire drill attachment and then went round them all with 80 followed by 240 grit.
The whole wheel was then sanded with 400 grit paper to key the surface, this took absolutely ages with them being 9 spoke wheels, probably around 4-5 hours to do all four.
Mask off the wheels making sure to get the tape right up under the lip of the alloy then wrap the rest of the wheel in newspaper or dust sheets & lay them all out flat in the most dust free place you have available, has to be somewhere you can leave them for the best part of a week.
I then gave the bare metal lip and bolt holes a coat of etch primer as normal primer will probably cause issues. Left it for a few hours then went over the whole wheel with two coats of high build primer followed by normal grey primer the next day.
The following day each wheel got a coat of "Ford Stratos Silver", it took 2 cans to cover all four wheels nicely, i went over the faces half an hour later with a fine mist coat to get a nice metallic sparkle in the paint.
Again a day later time to clear coat, I started with the sides of the spokes and bolt holes first and went at them from a steep angle with the paint, did this twice about 30 mins apart, then the faces of the wheels had four coats of lacquer each throughout the day spaced out by about an hour.
Leave the wheels once lacquered for as long as you can before the next bit, at least a couple of days.
Take the wheels out and use 1200 grit paper on them all over, keep a cup of clean water near by and keep the paper wet, it stops it clogging up and makes it glide over the surface really easily, you want to end up with a nice smooth matt finish in the clearcoat with little to no orange peel.
Use something like Halfords rubbing compound to buff them back up, and once they are shiny again move on to buffing them out further with something like autoglym paint renovator followed by autoglym super resin polish
Get some wax on them, after about a month they will probably want a quick polish up and re-wax, probably a good idea to keep them clean for the first month or so too as rattle can stuff seems to take ages to fully cure.
I did think they might need a rebalance after as i'd put filler on them and a small amount of metal has been taken away, plus the fact there are several rattle cans worth of paint on each wheel but I've already done 400 miles on them and they are fine.
