I mentioned in another thread that I recently discovered that my front wheels had previously been repaired, presumably by one of the two Dealers that have worked on my car. I discovered this when I used some paint thinner to clean some tar off them. I decided to repair them and this is how it went.

Here's the condition of the right front wheel after I "cleaned"
it and removed the paint. You can see the areas that were
repaired on the left.


First I scuffed up the repair areas with 600 and taped it up
as shown. I didn't have to sand or grind out any dings as
these were previously reapired as I mentioned.




Then I primed the bare aluminium with some grey laquer
primer.




Then came the hard part. As there are NO paint codes for
the wheels, finding a paint that matches is not easy. I
spent about two (2) hours at Refinish Line in Clearwater
(Thanks for putting up with me) comparing every color chip
they had in the store. I finally found a GM color that matched
pretty well and went with it. I purchased some acrylic enamel
base and a two (2) part urethane clear. Here are the wheels
after I applied the base coat. At this point I did not have
much confidence that the paint was going to match.




Then I scuffed them up with some scotch bright and
applied the clear coat and, to my surprise, they matched
pretty well. Here's the finished product. It still needs to be
cleaned up and polished etc once it get good and hard.
I also still have yet to finish the left front which had also
previously been repaired.

 

So what was the GM paint code?

 

The code I used was WA3024, Silver Argent but I don't recommend using it. It doesn't match that well. It looks ok in the photos but doesn't look all that great in the light of day. On a scale of 1-10 I'd give my repair job about a 4. Add to that the fact that the wheels are originally powder coated and you see the delema. Can't get a paint camera on them because there is no flat surface large enough so all you can do is try to guess. I looked at every silver metallic chip they had and that was as close as I could get. If I had it to do over again I would get a wheel man to do it. It would have cost me less time and money and aggravation. I have been told there are a couple of guys here that just travel around to the dealers, shops, etc and do spot repairs on wheels. Mine were repaired by one and it took me 6 months before I noticed and even then it was only because I took some paint thinner to them to remove some tar.

In an extraordinary turn of events though, I was contacted by one of the two Dealers that worked on my car this morning, the same one I asked yesterday, and he admitted that my rims had been repaired without telling me about it. The Dealership is going to replace both front rims at the final repair attempt on 3/22/04. So my pathetic repair job will be put out of it's misery.