Welcome to RAW Works. My name is Raymond and I live in the western suburbs of Sydney. This blog will be a portal for me to photo-document the wheels I refurbish and repaint. This is only a side hobby for me so there won't be any crazy custom jobs! My skills have only stretched so far as to using body repair materials, resprays and polishing, so anything that requires welding and unbuckling will be beyond what I can do. I hope to improve on my current skills as I go along, and as a lover of wheels, it's a way for me to express my art side as well as giving life to some tired wheels again.

At the moment, I'm just scouring through eBay for damaged wheels selling for cheap. If you have any wheels you don't need anymore, throw me an email/comment. At the moment I'm just buying sets of wheels to refurb then sell them off. I prefer not to do personal jobs/requests as I don't trust myself with that yet! But that said, pass me an email/comment if you need any help wheel-wise.

My Facebook page is @ http://www.facebook.com/raysalloywheelworks/, please "like" it!

Cheers.

Sep 30, 2010

Art project IV - Disassembly and sodablast

So today I decided to disassemble the Work CV wheel. I had started on polishing the lips a few months back, so I had the hardware taken off. The wheel was in horrible condition though, as I had left it sitting outside. Anyway, it was a really sunny and warm day today so I left the wheel to sit in the sun for about a half hour. With the Work CV, the wheel pieces were arranged with the centre-piece sandwiched between the inner and outer:



You can see the factory sealant between the pieces. I left it in the sun to warm up the sealant so it could come apart more readily. It worked, with some mallet persuasion :)



It was surprisingly easy to take off; the BBS RS wheel I had disassembled about a year ago was impossible (I ended up taking it to a wheel specialist to knock it off for me). The centre-piece took a bit more effort to knock off the inner section though (sealant may have cooled down) but a couple of hard whacks and it was off:



Absolutely no dramas at all, save for the outer piece hitting me in the shin (and bruising it haha) when I was knocking it out. Gotta be more careful next time.

I took all the pieces (including the bits for my BBS RS) to a sodablaster (Advanced Soda Blasting located in Blacktown) to completely strip them all back to clean metal. They'll do an infinitely better job than what I can with a drill and flapper wheel. I'm expected to pick them up tomorrow afternooon :)

Oh, and I also received these in the mail earlier this week :D



I've also decided to only do two wheels. Three wheels will take too long to complete and will also take up too much space. So I'll be ditching the rusted steelie...

1 comment:

Madhav Kunal said...

Thanks for writing thiss