The goal for this weekend was to paint and mount the polished wheels I bought from my buddy Dustin. They are 15x7 Centerline Storm and will be wrapped in the 23" slicks, which I'm sure will need to be replaced with 24.5" slicks by the end of the year. The wheels were originally polished, the first owner rattle canned them flat black, then Dustin stripped and polished them, now I'm painting them glossy black, so they have been around. I could have just sprayed them and called it a day, after all they are track wheels, but I'm way too picky for that.

I started by killing the polished look, then smoothed it out a little bit, just enough for the paint to stick. There were a lot of small scratches and dings, so for the first few hours I worked on those.

The process was pretty frustrating. These forged wheels are very porous, so every time they are sprayed more air would come to the surface while the paint filtered through all the tiny pores. I had to do several coats of primer, then several coats of ceramic paint with sanding after each coat. Eventually I ended up with a pretty smooth surface and can be polished to give a pretty close to perfect glass finish.

As you can see I never got far enough to mount the slicks on the wheels. I will take care of this sometime this week so that it can all be tested this weekend while the car is boost leak tested and final adjustments are made. Today I will be going to the dyno to tune in the boost and check AFR & knock, then we'll go from there.

Leave a comment!

  We appreciate your feedback so please use this section to leave a question or suggestion.

Code in the picture:
Your Name(*):
Comment(*):