sea-scooby

A buddy of mine recently bought an 01 Forester S with OEM alloys. The wheels were really scratched and had a bunch of undercoat overspray on them so we decided to paint them.

He wanted silver so we picked up a few cans of the Duplicolor Silver wheel paint. http://www.duplicolor.com/products/wheel.html

After all the prep work and the First coat of paint I compared the color to a set of FXT and WRX wheels I had laying around. It looked very similar, if not a perfect match.

One of my WRX wheels had a decent size paint chip near the center cap so I decided to give that area a quick spray. When the paint dried I could not tell where I had painted. It was a perfect match.

Another one of my WRX wheels was badly curbed on all 5 spokes so I sanded it down, filled in the scratches with a sandable primer and applied the Duplicolor silver wheel paint. It is a perfect match to the other 3 and I have to really look to tell which was the repair wheel.

If you have scratched or chipped one of your silver OEM wheels, check out the Duplicolor wheel paint. It is a cheap and easy fix.

Picks will be posted soon!

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sirwilliam

haha, that is funny this is the exact paint I was going to use to repaint my gunmetallic tarmac2's but changed my mind. Now I have 4 cans of silver and 2 cans of clear coat

Post some pics when done. I would like to see.

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sea-scooby

Thread Starter

here are some pix:

This is one of the 01 alloys we painted. The center cap is the untouched stock OEM cap off my XT wheels. I wanted to show how close the color is.



The wheel on the left was painted around the center cap area and on part of the spokes. The wheel on the right is untouched.

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SenorSubie

You painted the alloys??

good match for the wrx anyways

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sea-scooby

Thread Starter

We had no choice but to paint them. They had a goldish tint on the inner spoke part that was partially coming off. There were also tons of scratches and undercoat overspray we had to basically sand off.

We removed the wheels to try to clean them up and when my friend saw how nice my FXT wheels looked on his SF he decided to go with silver. It would have been a ton of work to refinish the polished alloys.

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sea-scooby

Thread Starter

Later with week I'm painting Tre36's stock steelies with the same paint but in the graphite color. It is basically a gunmetal metallic color.

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tre36

Can't wait to see the finish product. Thanks a million.

norcal

this may be a stupid question but...
can you spray paint alloy wheels??? if so what kind of paint would you use. i have some ACE hardware ruststopper paint and i was going to have a go at it. any suggestions???

tre36

According to the pics in the third post, yes. Those are alloy wheels in the pictures.

sea-scooby

Thread Starter

Anytime you paint metal wheels (aluminum of steel) you want to make sure you prep the surface right. You want to clean off all the brake dust, and use a 320-400 grit wet/dry sandpaper to remove any clearcoat, grim and loose paint. This will also help the primer stick. You should then use a self-etching or sandable primer to fill in any small flaws/dings/scratches your wheels might have. The primer is a necessary step because without it, the paint won't stick very well. After a few months you will end up with many chips and an overall crappy looking wheel if you skip the primer. After painting you can add a clearcoat layer to help protect the paint and enhance the shine.

To do it right, it will take you 3-5 hours to do a set of wheels. The time will vary depending on how much prep your wheels will need.

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norcal

thanks for the info..
i am starting soon

Tifighter

I did this a little while ago, in case you are wondering what the steelies look like in graphite:

Tifighter's car

It was a good 6 hour job, but I did it on a colder day. Wash, degrease, sand, prime, paint x 3, clearcoat...lotsa fun.;) Turned out great!

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Photothug

I am going to try to restore a set of RS Wheels to put on my FX, but these RS wheels are going to need some work. They have been sitting on a wrecked RS in a dealer lot forever. There is some oxidation that I am going to have to sand off. I was thinking of getting them sandblasted and powdercoated but thats going to cost me 300.00 bucks. I painted a pair of truck wheels from silver to flat black once. Did a pretty good job I think.

I want to go gunmetal, but I figured if they chip, silver won't show since there's silver underneath.
Does anyone know what the Duplicolor paint match color is for Subaru's silver wheels?

KIX

Try this:

Dupli-Color :: Wheel Coating

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Photothug

Duplicolor Silver? That's the name of the paint? They have hundreds of silvers. Can you be more specific?