![\"IMG_9089.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/09\/IMG_9089.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nI thought it wouldn’t be too hard to clean them up, but I was wrong! After some rust removing and stripping, I tried cleaning one up and almost decided it was pointless. There was just so much rust and it would take forever. I played around with photoshop dropping in the white wall tires with various rims that I could buy. Here are some EMPI 8 spoke GT wheels, white I like quite a bit, but don’t 100% go with the classic white wall look.<\/p>\n
I’m already committed to the white walls, since I already bought them, so I figured I’d do some more stripping and rust removing on the original rims to get them up to some better condition. Heck — I can easily buy new rims anytime later, should I choose. Here I am thinking about painting the center rims red:<\/p>\n So, after more work of stripping, rust removing, and sanding I got the rims cleaned up quite nice.<\/p>\n I decided to powder coat the back half to make it more durable. In hindsight, I probably could have powdercoated the whole thing and used that as primer for the red; however, I would have still had to shoot some gray primer as a base color for the red.<\/p>\n Here’s the prepared rim:<\/p>\n Then shot with gloss black powder:<\/p>\n \n And after baking for ~25 minutes:<\/p>\n Fast forward a bit with two coats of gray primer (sanding between coats), two coats of the same red as the car, and two clear coats and we have:<\/p>\n \n Then I got them mounted on the wheels and they look great!<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n