Large Pics: Cleaning up old Wheels for use as "Winter Wheels"

Matt Simis

18" Winter tyres are pricey and rare, the done thing is usually to use one size smaller for Winter. So I had a set of 17" Audi Allroad stock 2 piece wheels lying about. Now to be clear, I hate these wheels. They look dumb and clunky, but they are also wide body offset (like the Allroad) so they fit S-cars quite well (like my olde S8). So I put them on and continued to hate the look..
Over the weekend I have been cleaning them up with whatever I had in stock in the garage, nothing fancy or expensive here and no large amounts of time spent (though more than I thought and Im still not done!).

I liked the idea of a Black outer spoke and silver inner spoke, so picked up some Gloss Black and Audi Silver in Halfords. Separating the 2-piece wheels was quite time consuming, something like 20 bolts thread locked for some reason holding them together.

The Wheel - its a two piece design (though the stupid Audi colour scheme hides this)


Scrubbed with wire brush and Cleaned (much paint flaked off, looks a lot nicer in photo than reality). Then primed with Filler Primer (this is a fast job, too lazy to sand it properly)


End Result (though car is jacked up for other side wheel removal):


Now not everyone likes dark wheels, but they do work well on some cars and excellent in this dull, muddy season. For "free wheels" and crap lying about, I like the look a lot.


PS: Ignore the crap on the tyres themselves, will come off itself/clean off later.

Blazer

very nicely done..I'm a lazy bastard so would have just paid for the winter tyres or else half done the job and gave then

mickdw

That halfords filler/primer is hopeless. Ive used it before and to call it a filler is a bit optimistic.

TouchingVirus

I'm going with some stock 14" that came on my old yolk, they look horrid but I couldn't give a sh#t if it makes the difference between staying on the road and ending up in a ditch or worse :P

Love the paint job though, very nice

Matt Simis

mickdw wrote: »

That halfords filler/primer is hopeless. Ive used it before and to call it a filler is a bit optimistic.

Yeah incidentially Ive never used it before. It didnt stick well to the outer spokes, so they were done in standard grey primer. I wouldnt really recommend it, though it is clearly thicker and more "rubbery" than standard primer.

Anan1

Sc@recrow wrote: »

very nicely done..I'm a lazy bastard so would have just paid for the winter tyres or else half done the job and gave then

Me too! I got a set of 16" wheels from an older Forester XT for €150, bought the winter tyres online and had my local Subaru dealer fit the tyres to the wheels, balance, fit new valves and mount for €10 a corner. It doesn't look massively sexy, but it didn't before anyway.