Hey Guys
I thought I would make a separate thread of this project, as it is quite a big one (at least for me).
I decided that I wanted to get some winter wheels for the Jazz, partly to protect the alloy wheels during winter, but also as a nice little project, and a cheap way of having new wheels, without breaking the bank.
I was really lucky to actually find a set of the Honda Jazz Base Model Mk2 15" Steel Wheels that had nearly new Dunlop Winter Response 2 tyres on them. They were a rare find, and exactly what I wanted. I managed to haggle the price down a bit, as I had to drive a 350mile round trip with a total of 8 hours of driving to pick them up.
But I knew I wasn't going to find another set like this any time soon. The Tyres alone are about £70 each, and the chances of finding steel wheels that would fit the Jazz, and that already had good winter tyres on them that were the correct size would be very slim.
So I drove up there last month and picked them up, and they were in decent enough condition, I was going to refurb them anyway, so as long as they weren't rusted to hell, I didn't really care about a bit of rust on the wheels.
I sold the hub caps on eBay, so I made £20 of my money back
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They were bit dirty, and needed a damn good clean.
I decided to work on 1 wheel at a time, so I could learn and get the technique down and then the rest of the wheels should turn out better, as I would learn from any mistakes with the first wheel.
I carefully cleaned and sanded down the first wheel ready for painting, using 240grit wet and dry and working my way up with 400grit and 600 grit.
I had seen in youtube tutorials people using report cards to easily mask the wheel off, so I bought some cards, and it actually made it pretty easy. I completely deflated the tyre to make it easier to wedge the card under the wheel rim.
For the inside, I just bought some Hammerite Smooth Black spray paint, as I didn't really care about the look or finish for the inside, just so long as any bare metal was covered and protected from rust. But it actually turned out looking quite nice.
For the front of the wheel, I wanted to do something a bit different.
I originally was going to paint the wheels completely White, or completely Black.
But I decided to try and paint just the lip white, and the centre as deep gloss black as I could.
As I always liked two tone wheels. Little did I know just how hard it was going to be to pull that off.
I bought some etch primer, and White and Black wheel paint from Halfords, along with their Bodyshop Lacquer Spray paint.
I masked up the wheel as best I could to avoid any paint on the tyre, or the freshly painted inside.
I did 3 coats of Primer, but I did get some running, which I had to sand back and start again with, so for the next wheel, I will definitely do more but lighter coats of primer to prevent this.
With the primer on, I decided to paint the white lip first. I didn't bother masking off the wheel centre, as I thought the black will easily cover over any of the white that is sprayed on the centre.
The white came out quite nice, but again, I did get some running, so I just need to be more patient and do lighter coats.
For the centre, I used the report cards again to best mask off the area, which made it a lot easier to paint. I used a piece of string attached to the valve stem so I could pull the valve stem back to paint in the gap without accidentally touching the paint with my fingers.
The black came out a lot better with no running at all, probably the better surface area
Then the final reveal
Unfortunately, the masking hadn't gone quite to plan, and it had missed some of the areas and some of the black had gotten onto the white.
I used some rubbing alcohol to clean off the black over spray, and I sprayed some of the black spray paint into the spray cap, and used a very find paint brush to paint the missed areas.
It looks crap if you look up close, but I just kept telling myself they are winter wheels, it doesn't really matter
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So I set about doing the last stage, the clear coat, and decided to learn from my mistakes, and do lots of lighter coats of paint, as clear coat is the worst to fix if it runs!
I did 6 coats in total, but I still didn't really get the deep glossy finish I was after.
I'm going to give it two weeks to cure, and then attack it with some polish and see if I can get that deep shine out of it.
The paint doesn't feel smooth at all, it feels quite rough.
But even without the final polish, it doesn't look half bad:
I did a test fit on the car to see how it looked, and I'm pretty happy with it. Though the 15" wheels do look a bit on the small side compared to the 16" Si Wheels.
Also bought one of those tyre pens, and I had a mess around with colouring in the words on the tyre. I might do it for the final wheel, I haven't decided yet.
Now that I have done one wheel, I think on the next one, I am going to try painting the black centre first then painting the white, I think that might make the paint job come out better. And I will do more lighter coats and see how that comes out. Hopefully I will actually have these wheels finished for winter
!
I've also been looking at getting some centre caps to try and cover the centre of the wheel hub.
I bought some that fitted the wheel perfectly, but when I test fitted the wheel, the wheel hub centre on the rear was further out than the centre of the wheel, so it just pushed out the centre cap, so I have bought some centre caps that have a raised centre, which should sort out this problem, I am just waiting for them to arrive from China, which might take a while.
I will update this thread with my progress with the rest of the wheels.