My first Made to order Aero Hub caps
 

Friend of mine lost a hub cap and asked me to make him a set of Aero hubcaps.

And thus started my adventure. I spent a weekend diving the local boneyards. Apparently Mr 15" rim got sauced at the company Christmas party and made a tit of himself getting ostricized by the other rims. At least thats the only reason I can come up with for the total lack of 15" hub caps.

So I found a cheap set at Wallmart. Using the T-shirt method I started Fiberglassing over the Hubcaps. about the second or third coat I put my Hubcaps outside to cure . I live in Oregon. Its cloudy here. I've learned to ignore the clouds. Bad move.

About 3 minutes after I put the hub caps out. It rained (only for about 5 minmutes and the only rain we had that day). Made a mess of my glass job.

So. Nocked the resultant bubbles down. Cleaned with Acetone to get the wet resin off, sanded them down to nothing.

A couple coats later I noticed that I was running out of Hardener. I tried an experimental batch of resin with less hardener than normal. Bad move. Didn't cure. So I tried an old painters trick and made a batch with extra hardener and worked it into the uncured resin as good as possible. Worse move. Came out terrible. Blotches still didn't cure. More acetone. More sanding. more fiberglass.

I ended up buying a D.A. sander, this was probably the best move I've made all year. (Power tools! Yay!) I sanded the hubcaps till they where reasonably smooth... then I applied paint, every scratch bubble and warp showed up. Next time I'm just gonna Zip tie Coroplast to the hubcaps.

So here they are.

http://i110.photobucket.com/albums/n...aOrange007.jpg

Saw this at a local gas station and figured this was the place to share it.

http://i110.photobucket.com/albums/n...g?t=1337978854

:D Got a good laugh out of the cartoon. Thank for posting it.

Live and learn! At least you got a new sander out of the project! :D

And pretty smooth hubcaps.... even if they're not perfect.