[bluesteel93]

Man it's been a long couple of weeks. Polishing wheels is hard work. Never again. The guide I used to polish these wheels was posted a few posts back if anyone is curious. Here's some pics:

Here's how my HX wheels looked before. Crappy black paint job.


I used aircraft stripper to take all of the paint off. Under the black coat was white paint, and under the white was the original silver paint. So it took about three coats of aircraft stripper to get it down to bare metal.






After that each wheel was wet sanded with 220 grit.


Here's after 400 grit.


And a comparison between the 400 grit and a bare metal wheel.


After sanding with 1000 grit I masked off the wheels to get them ready for paint.






Here's how they turned out after painting. You can kind of see some of the rough edges on the paint, which is why you paint them after 1000 grit.




Here's them after 1500 and 2000 grits. Top wheel is 1500, bottom is 2000.








That's it for sanding. Then I polished them with Mothers Mag and Aluminum polish. I only did one coat of polish because I didnt want them too shiny .




Last step was to wax them with a carnauba wax. This is supposed to keep the aluminum from tarnishing in the future as well as making them easier to clean.




That's it! Here's all four of them polished and waxed!


Finished them up last night and this afternoon I went down to the tire shop to get my BRIDGESTONE POTENZZA RE92'S INSTALLED!!!!!! In the words of Ali G, Booyakashya!!! I'm pretty excited to have this wheel/tire combo on the car in case you couldn't tell. Also got the car aligned while I was there. Toe was way off from the lowering spring install. Camber is a little negative but not too bad. Nothing I can do about that unless I want to get adjustable upper control arms.




That's it for now. I'll get more pics of the wheels on the car soon. I can already tell brake dust is going to be my enemy for awhile... Excited to see what gains will be had from the RE92's too.