Painting Steel Wheels

1/4" fine-line is your best friend when it comes to painting wheels with the rubber still on them... Still, for best results, you should have the rubber off...

If you ever plan to get new wheels, I'd say just bomb them with the rubber on...

If you want to keep body-colored steelies forever (i.e. with some dog-dishes for the factory-fresh look), it would be very worth it to bust the tires, bead/sandblast the wheels down, and paint all surfaces. Further, every time you get the wheels balanced, specifically ask for inner-wheel stick-on weights instead of the clip-ons... Like they put on Corvettes and such.


- CK

P.s. A note about taping off tires: Except for the fine-line, you should NOT use one strip of masking tape to circumnavigate your whole wheel; it should take at LEAST five strips. After a while, the tape just becomes too bent to work with and you gotta start a new strip... Best way to avoid the pinchies (the area where the tape has to be pinched and tamped to create a decent seal, and even then isn't 100%), and thus keep your paint from blasting all over your tire. :)