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 13, 2012

Project Kouki, part 1 - drawing board

At the moment I've got multiple projects going on - this is another 17" BBS RS build for another 5x114.3 equipped car.  Most of you will have already guessed what car this project will be destined for (hint: project name), and some epic sizes no doubt will be birthed here.

First things first, the donor.



 
RS264: 17x7 ET45 5x114.3



RS265: 17x8 ET50 5x114.3.

Perfect specs for achieving big dish with big width.

Some preliminary widened specs were drawn up.


It goes without saying that I won't be revealing the final specs until the project is finished :)

Anyway, upon receiving the wheels I came upon so undesirable features...



It's becoming all too common to see these 20+ year old wheels all battered and shit.  A shame really.  I was really hoping all the barrels could be reused (lips I didn't really care, being replaced anyway).  The RS264 used the smaller, damaged 6" barrels (yes, both were damaged).



The RS265 had good 7" barrels, though it was easy to see that they had been repaired previously.  The barrel sprayed black seems to have been rerolled and there were signs of some welding work (buckle and crack repair) but the work seems top notch (similar to what I've encountered with Peter @ OZWheels @ Minchinbury, now unfortunately closed).  The other barrel seems to have had a consistent, circumferential welding bead along where the hump of the wheel would normally be situated.  The barrel could have possibly buckled inwards (as opposed to where it occurs commonly on the outside edge or rim profile), i.e. right where the hump is, hence the need to weld extra metal to maintain that part of the wheel.  Whatever the reasons, the RS265s look like they've been repaired well, and there were no visual buckles or cracks.

New lips, bolts/nuts and centrecaps have been ordered.  Hopefully they'll arrive in time for an upcoming event, so this project will need to be built on a pretty rushed timeline. 

As such, I'll be replacing the damaged 6" barrels with some of my own stashed-away barrels.  I'm not 100% sure, but I think they're 6.5" barrels, meaning the final specs will be slightly different to what I had calculated above.  If indeed they're 6.5" barrels, then the new possibilities will be:

0.5" lips -- 6" barrels -- 17x7 ET45
0.5" lips -- 6.5" barrels -- 17x7.5 ET51
2.5" lips -- 6.5" barrels -- 17x9.5 ET26
3.0" lips -- 6.5" barrels -- 17x10 ET19
3.5" lips -- 6.5" barrels -- 17x10.5 ET13
4.0" lips -- 6.5" barrels -- 17x11 ET6

They're still being dismantled currently, but we'll be cleaning them up and getting them ready so we can just bang them straight on when they arrive.

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