Project Turtle: Bluesteel93's Civic VX build

[bluesteel93]

Did a little painting yesterday to clean up the look of the car. Here's what needed to be painted.


My new grill block, my wiper arms and the lower front window trim pieces. I decided to use the duplicolor bumper paint based on OG VX's success with it. I also bought a filler primer to help fill in the scratches on the sheet aluminum and the trim pieces.

Here's them primed


Painted


And back on the car






I forgot to get more pics of the brackets I made to attach the grill block because it started to rain as I went to put them back on. It's basically just like described in my previous post though.

In other news I just got my wheel straightened today so RE92's will be coming in the near future! I'll be busy polishing out all of my HX wheels until then though, which is definitely going to take awhile... Hahaha

Edit:Here's a picture of a white EG with polished HX wheels. This picture is basically what inspired me to get HX wheels and want to polish them.

[Baltothewolf]

Thanks blue! I think I'll go and get some aluminum from a buddy of mine and try this out myself.

[OG VX]

Boomshakalaka!!

[Baltothewolf]

Just remember Blue, there is a fine line between 'that looks nice' and 'Holy **** that's ricer' hahaha.

[Joggernot]

Holy **** that looks nice! You might motivate me to do something for my car...

[bluesteel93]

Originally Posted by Baltothewolf

Just remember Blue, there is a fine line between 'that looks nice' and 'Holy **** that's ricer' hahaha.

You calling the polished rims ricer boy?! haha maybe I'll get a fart can some z3 fender vents and a **** load of stickers then...

Just kidding

[Baltothewolf]

Originally Posted by bluesteel93

You calling the polished rims ricer boy?! haha maybe I'll get a fart can some z3 fender vents and a **** load of stickers then...

Just kidding

Rofl m8 I'll rek u!!

No but seriously I wasn't talking about the rims, those are actually really nice. How do you do that? I may consider doing that to mine.

[bluesteel93]

I'll be following this guide I found from a different forum. Civic EG :: View topic - How to polish your rims

It's definitely going to take some time but I already have all of the paint stripped from the rims after today, so I just gotta sand, paint and polish... x4.

[Baltothewolf]

Originally Posted by bluesteel93

I'll be following this guide I found from a different forum. Civic EG :: View topic - How to polish your rims

It's definitely going to take some time but I already have all of the paint stripped from the rims after today, so I just gotta sand, paint and polish... x4.

Wow that actually looks really good! That paint job on that civic looks like a 2-door camry I saw once that was putting out like ~320hp. The guy wrecked it really, really badly and totalled it sadly. I was actually going to do that to my camry if it hadn't gotten wrecked.

[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.