I've been wanting to change up the look of my car a bit and recently found some BMW style 71 wheels for sale on craigslist. I like the two piece design and decided to buy the set and refinish them as a new set of wheels for daily driving.
Nice stack of new wheels hanging out with my track wheels and spare tires for the style 68's. Starting to acquire a bit of a collection here:
The wheels themselves are in decent shape, no bends or cracks, but definitely need refinishing and there's a bit of pitting, some minor curb rash, and the paint is a bit faded on the centers.
The first step was to clean them up a bit and remove the centers from the barrels. This was honestly a lot harder than I expected because the bolts were on there pretty tight and there's 76 of them! Not to mention it was hot as balls outside this weekend while I was doing this. Also, the bolts are a weird 8mm triple-square bit, but I was able to find one in stock at NAPA Auto parts for about 8 bucks. Luckily, I didn't snap any of the bolts, and a couple whacks with a dead blow hammer popped the centers out easily.
With the centers removed, I stripped the clear coat from the lips and then scrubbed them off with a scotchbrite pad. It took two coats of the paint stripper to get all of the clear coat off, but I probably didn't wait long enough for the first coat to work its magic before I started scrubbing...
Anyway, with the chipped and faded clear coat removed, the wheels are already starting to look better!
The next step is to take care of the curb rash and polish the lips to a nice shine...to be continued!