[clarkey1984]

Last weekend I got the shed nice and toasty with the heaters on, and after getting the old tyres off in the day by my good friends at Haywards United farmers, I set about prepping and painting my pair of steel rims in preparation to receive their winter tyres, it went predictively wrong.

First wheel, beautiful, second one, reactions all over the place, despite the same sanding and degreasing, it just failed, as you can see in the 2nd photograph. Then I decided to try and sand back the areas where it had reacted, re clean, and then repaint, but then I realised that if I were to do this then I wouldn't leave myself enough white to do the blow in I need to do on one of the alloys, and I doubt I can get this particular paint again (middle of Lidl special) so I tried some other white that I found nearly a full can of, which then wrinkled up in spectacular fashion, it must have been incompatible, I didn't bother photographing that.

So today I did what I should have done to start with, which was take them to work and give them the UHP water treatment, the perks of working at a blasting company.

I'm unsure as to what the black coating that these had on them under the black and silver factory finish is, but my god it's hard, even with ultra high pressure water jets at 50,000 psi it wasn't coming off particularly well, then the machine spat a seal and would only make about 35k, so I elected to leave the black stuff on the second wheel. I'm not overly worried about the swirl marks from the jets as that's what the primer is for, I chose etch primer this time, nice and grippy.

After a light sand to remove the flash rust, and three degreases with different new rags (taking no chances this time) I'm more than happy with how the primer came out, all there is are two tiny pinholes in the metal below, I might just pop a little mig in there and then flat it, but then again it's only very minor, I just wish I'd just done this from the start, to quote one of my favourite YouTube car people, "its all been very hubnut" oh well, I got there in the end. Just a trip to somewhere that sells gloss white topcoat at some point and I'll be there.