Page Four

I just got a set of 16" Porsche Fuchs Rims for the car. I got them on E Bay.

They are Genuine Porsche 911 SC rims, 16"x6" for the front, and 16"x7" for the back. I am going through a few ideas for tire sizes. I think I will go with 195/50x16s for the front cause they are within 5% (tire height) of the 135s that are on there now, and 225/55x16 for the back, these are also within 5% of the existing 205 tires. I want to keep the diameters close beacuse I like the stance the car has now, and I need to keep the backend up to clear the Berg Deep-Sump.

The rims have a few scratches, so next thing I have to do is polish them for a fully polished look. I plan on doing this myself with a hand drill and polishing wheels.

The rims arrived on Tuesday evening, they appeared to be in pretty good condition, one 6" front rims was a bit worse than I thought, but nothing I can't polish out. The first thing I did was took them to my friend Jordan who put them on a state of the art balance machine to see if they ran true and wern't bent. Here is one of the rear rims sitting at the tire shop:

They were bang on the money, strait as an arrow and balanced out better than any aftermarket rim he has seen, he was impressed.

So the next project was to start polishing, I set up a little station in my furnace room in the basement to do this:

Here is a close up of one of the rims, during the rough (80 grit) compound stage, this was the worst of the rims:

They look bad, so I decided to try a different approach. I went and bought some Aircraft Paint Stripper from a local paint supply store:

The paint Porsche use on these rims is unbelieveably tough, the paint stripper dosen't even bubble up, it just sits there, I found the best approach was to scrub the rims with a stainless steel soft bristle wirebrush, then apply the paint stripper, let ir sit for a few minutes, then gently scrub with the brush again. This is a photo between applications:

I took about 5-6 applications of the paint stripper in this method to fully remove the paint (told you it was tough!), now i had to figure out a way it remove the anodized coating that was on the complete rims. After a few hours of research on the Web I found a simple easy way to remove the coating that is readily available. The product, in case you want to know is, Easy-Off heavy duty oven cleaner, it works awesome, just spray it on let it sit for a 5-10 mins and wipe it off with a wet rag.:

Here are a couple of photos of the fully stripped rim, you can see where I polished a section to test and see if it will work:

Now I just have to strip the other 3 rims, now that I know the secret it should be a bit easier.

See:
Page 1 - intro page
Page 2 - engine specs.
Page 3 - engine rebuild
Page 4 - new rims
Page 5 - beam narrowing
Page 6 - misc mods
Page 7 - the green limousine
Page 8 - friends rides
Page 9 - 2003 Las Vegas Bug-O-Rama