Tony was pretty keen on having the wheels ready for an OzHonda meet at JDMYard on the 26th November, so he helped me out as much as he could with the rebuilding of the wheels. The centrecaps were sanded down from 120 grit to 600 grit, and any gashes were covered up with Selleys Metal Knead-It putty. I chose this specific putty as it was convenient to use, quick to set, and easy to sand down.
VHT's engine enamel primer was applied before spraying on some thick coats of VHT's wrinkle black paint.
Usually the wrinkle black takes an eternity to dry and wrinkle in normal temperatures as three thick, heavy coats in cross-hatching spray patterns are recommended, but I enlisted the help of a heat gun to accelerate the wrinkling process.
This was what the centrecaps looked like after ~3 minutes of continuous heating:
And about a minute later, the wrinkling sped up vastly and it looked like this within a matter of seconds:
Note some slight inconsistencies in the reflection of the paint - these spots were still quite wet underneath the top wrinkle layer.
I should mention that from the beginning of sanding all the way to the wrinkling of the paint took a couple of days, as I gave the putty overnight to dry as well as the primer.
Next up was a thorough metal polishing of the lips. Once the bolts are on, it'll be extremely hard to polish in between the bolts so it's best to give it a decent polish before they get mounted. It's hard to capture it in the pics but the new lips out of the box had some very very fine sand marks in it. Of course this is quite normal unless you paid for a mirror polished product, so the aim of polishing it again yourself is to try and maintain and get rid of those excess hairline scratches. This is the result of two complete thorough polishes (Autoglym's Metal Polish was used):
Once all the lips were polished up, Wheel Wax was applied to the centres. I don't believe we applied it to the lips but we should have, along with the inners. This is just so the wheels have an extra layer of protection and allow for an easier ordeal when it comes to cleaning the wheels.
Once the maintenance was done, it was time to mount the pieces back together using the new black bolts. I'd recommended tightening the bolts with the nuts hand tight (grip on to sockets instead of the bare hardware for better leverage) and ensure they are bolted on in a star pattern. I usually bolt them up in a 4 point star pattern (similar to bolting up a 4-stud wheel). Here are some fancy shots half-way through:
Once all the hand-tightened bolts and nuts are in place, I then use an appropriate torque wrench and torque up the nuts to 24 ft lbs. The bolts are usually held down securely as they should have been done hand-tight already. I had new nuts for one wheel and reused the old nuts for the other three. No Loctite was used but the nuts are holding up fine.
A helper isn't really needed here, but it will definitely make the time go by faster!
Tony helping out with the torquing!
Once all the bolts for all the wheels were torqued down, the next step was to seal. Check out Part 3 here.
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