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Before this car, I have never thought that I might be doing any sort of work on the car myself... so these will be dodgy, but I enjoyed doing them.

First the hollow spoke 14" for the track

I started this in March, after getting the Hollow spoke original wheels off Sweep 77 in Melbourne. I had 5, so I toyed with one. As I have never ever done something like this I wanted to use the odd one as a test bed. The colours turned out okay, skills not so much. I left the rest till now. I hope no one else is stupid enough to paint their wheels in such an ugly colour combination, these would only look right out on the circuit and hence when I'm done they will be wrapped in R888 195 14s and left for race days ONLY.

Next up is the road wheels

I'm redoing these NB8A wheels in black and silver as per how they came. But instead of painting the edges silver, I think I will polish them... thank you Mark for nailing this idea in! The wheels have slight dmagae wich I am sanding flat, or as flat as possible... my question is, if there are small amounts of silver paint left on the surface... when polished what will happen? I did ask Nath this arvo, and we had agreed that the paint should be ALL gone, but I'm just wondering if any one has experience with small amounts left. At the moment the wheel that's ready to paint and polish looks like this



You can see small traces of paint left on the lip, and also where the veritcal edge meet the horizonal... very hard to get in there with the hands and sand paper. Can I leave it as it is for polish?

Also the idea is to mask the lip area, paint the spokes, sand away any paint/primer that leaked, then polish. Is that would you guys would do as a process?



And I have also ran out of sand paper. I didn't count how quickly these ones I bought today were used up... low quality from Repco... never again... but now I am adamant the wheels can not be put back on the car till painted. hahahaha.... and offcourse living between mosman and neutral bay means no one here goes to a hardware store, or know what a tool is, both functional and sometimes the non functional I found one hardware shop on my walks today... it was closed down....

This is the wheel after I got home last night, still in work clothes I did the final sanding with 800grit.
[img]http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc4/hs119.snc4/36327_399945481679_710981679_4722175_2177476_n.jpg[/img[

After dinner, it was time to mask. I have decided to paint first the polish later. I was running out of time, if I can, I will take the car to work the next day rather than walk.


Then it was 1 prime, 3 coats. By 1AM both wheels had been painted. This morning I got up at 7 to give myself an hour to polish and fit. There's always excitment for me when removing the masking tapes, did I stuff it up???? After twice polishing the lip this is the restult


And both of them


And finally on the car, 8:10AM, ready to go to work! And it rained... hahahaha

They look okay to me!

Out of interest...what do your neighbours think of your MX5 mountain in the car park?!

Wow, I was kind of skeptical about your plans for the 8A wheels but they look a million bucks!

Hehehe started doing the front ones after I got home tonight, park, put the car on stands. Got an email from my neighbour later telling me my tyres were stolen hahahaha they're so far okay with it. Girl parks next to me don't seem to mind too much, well she does tell me the tyres are stolen... and the guy parks opposite still smiles and waves at me every time. Luckily my space is at the top of the parking area so most of the popel in the building do no get to see that part in detail. after the wheels are done half of that space will be cleaned out, at the moment its full of paper, paint, filler etc etc. The track wheels will be stored some where... don't know where yet. Maybe in the house.

Glad you like Chris. Not sure if I should have gone the gloss version of that paint, but it's alright. Plan to keep hitting the wheel with polish once a day for a week.

looks good Karl - prefer matt black to gloss here.