Living in the northern hemisphere with regular winter snowfall means just one thing for alloy wheels. Corrosion unless you have a spare set of wheel rims available for winter use only.

With winter snow and ice comes local council gritting and salt spreading machines which do a great job of clearing away the ice and snow but they also unfortunately do away with the lustre on your once gleaming alloy wheels. If you are going to try to sell your vehicle as a used car you\’ll have to try to make your car stand out from the crowd.

One way to do this is by a relatively quick and easy repair job to tired looking alloy wheels.

Once the factory applied lacquer has been penetrated salt laden water travels underneath spreading corrosion so the only way to bring back that factory look is by drastic action.

Depending on how badly corroded the alloy surface is determines your options. If the wheels are pretty badly corroded like my daughters then the only option was to paint them otherwise the amount of corroded metal to be removed would be too much and the repaired finish unpredictable.

First the remaining old factory finish lacquer has to be removed which is no easy task. I used a brand of stripper call Talstrip which did work well but still took 3 – 4 applications per wheel to remove all the original lacquer. Next out came the Dremmel wire brush and 400 grit to remove the bumpy areas around the wheel rims.

A quick going over with 1200 grit wet or dry paper smoothed out the finish completely but I still didn\’t think the surface would be good enough for a clear only lacquer.

If your wheels are in better shape than the ones I was working on, you can pretty much stop there other than to recoat the wheels (after proper masking of the tires and air valve) with at least 2 coats of clear lacquer to protect the finish again.

I had to paint the wheels and that called for a self-build primer to further flatten out any remaining lumps & bumps, rub that down, re-prime and then a quick coat of primer sealer to make sure the primer stayed put.

For paint I chose a Mercedes Silver so I could be pretty sure that colour would look great. Thankfully I had a compressor and spray gun I could use but aerosols can be a good alternative as after all they are only wheels (as someone in the paint shop said to me). After 2 coats of base coat the wheels began to shine again.

To really finish off the \’new\’ look I added 2 coats of clear top coat or lacquer and the wheels looked perfect and (almost) brand new. I added a tin of tire shine to my shopping list, sprayed it on and the whole job only cost $120. I\’d previously been quoted $400 to have the wheels professionally finished.

Author Bio: I hope the article about renovating alloy wheels helps encourage those who would otherwise have to pay a lot of money to have their wheels back in pristine condition. For more information on used cars in Halifax please visit Harvard Autos. Need used car finance on a new vehicle try our finance page and find out more details.

Category: Automotive
Keywords: used cars,renovating alloy wheels,alloy wheels