Painted my Bottlecaps

I got my car painted this summer and it looks great now. Instead of the faded dusty pink, it's now all shiny and red again.

With winter coming eventually, I thought I'd clean up my winter rims a bit so they didn't look quite so awful. I use an old set of bottlecap rims for my winter tires. But over the years all the paint has come off them and they look pretty ratty.



So, last time I put in an order at BavAuto I threw in a request for a $30 can of genuine Wurth silver wheel paint. It took a couple of weeks for the order to be sent. It's been sitting on a shelf for about a month since then waiting for just the right day, which finally came up this past weekend.

I scrubbed all the dirt off the rims, washed them up best I could, can't be bothered to fill the pits and scratches though, taped off the tires (don't need silver tires), gave the rattle can a good shake, and went to it.

I got half way around the outer rim of the first wheel, thinking this stuff isn't going on evenly, it's kind of splotchy, when it, um, stops. Thirty seconds into the paint job, the damn can is dead. There's plenty of paint in it, but no pressure. Well crap.

I hopped in the car, quick trip to Canadian Tire, bought a cheap can of silver Tremclad, and here's the result.

Looks nice! I painted a set of basketweaves once with wheel paint from the parts store, and they came out, well,... not so nice.

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Dave
'91 325iX

I was pleasantly surprised at how well they turned out. But then, anything would have been an improvement over what they looked like before.

Good job!
I have painted steel wheels before, with those canned spary paint, never ventured to do the alooy wheels.
I did the hood of an old car once, and it took 4 cans and still came out knind of strange...
Spary paint has more to it than it looks when you see someone who knows painting...
And the "new" Benz could use some touching up...

The tape wouldn't stick to the rubber tires, or bend nicely in a circle, so I used overlapping one-inch strips jammed between the rim and tire bead. Once I had a complete circle around the rim, I used more tape to stick newspaper to the existing tape circle. That worked nicely to avoid getting any silver paint onto the tires themselves.

But when I started spraying the paint on, I'd only got gone lightly around the outer rim before the pressure died in the spray can. And it was all splotchy. That was discouraging.

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Ferdinand
I scrubbed all the dirt off the rims, washed them up best I could, taped off the tires (don't need silver tires),...

Funny thing, the instructions on the can say to make sure the rims are cleaned with all rust removed. But I just noticed the picture on the can of Wurth Silver Wheel Paint shows the paint being sprayed onto the sidewall of the tire, not the rim. Bizarre.

Very nice. Did the exact same thing to mine but here in the states, I used Dulicolor metallic silver and Duplicolor clear. They were about $6 per can, a can of each did all 4. Duplicolor is available at Pep Boys as well as most of the chain auto parts stores.

alan

Did you spray it with the wheel laying down? Usually spray cans are made to be used upright, otherwise you might run out of gas before you run out of paint.

Wheels were laying flat, no problem.

alan

From my experience, spray cans work best used verticaly to spray over vertical or inclined objects, like Michiel wrote.

I painted my bottle caps with Krylon (or whatever the popular hardware store brand was at the time) about 9 years ago and they still look great. Don't underestimate the quality of the off-the-shelf spray can paint. I think the key to the paint job lasting so well was that I did spend a lot of time thoroughly sanding the wheels by hand with a 180 grit wet paper prior to applying the paint. As with any paint job, surface preparation is everything.

Andy
1987 325ic

The wheels were laying flat.

I held the can mostly upright. The Wurth can just had no pressure to begin with and went flat almost immediately.

With the cheap can, that I bought after, I managed 4 coats on each rim and there was still enough pressure in the can to clear the nozzle with the can held upside-down.