I have those wheels on my project car. They had a machined face with painted inserts and painted barrels. I paid 200$ for them. The clearcoat on the machined faces was starting to flake off and the paint had seen better days.
I wanted to refinish them. At first, I asked around a couple of shops if they could chemically strip the old finish off so I could polish the machined face and repaint the rest. I already polished some other wheels, it requires patience but it's not so bad, especially if the face is relatively flat like those wheels. No one wanted my money unless I would pay 1000$+ for a turnkey refinish job. So I thought about mechanically stripping the clearcoat. I found a sandblast guy willing to do all 4 wheels for 160$. I drop the wheels at his shop. I tell him to only do the faces. I take time to explain to him that I want to polish them so please go easy on the sand and use something fine. He tells me not to worry and that they will be smooth when I get them back. Two months later he returns the wheels. I swear he must have used gravel as the blasting media or something. The wheels were super rough and pitted. Oh and they were fully blasted too, not only the face as I asked for.
At that point, there was no turning back. The guy couldn't unblast them of course. I got a quote from a powdercoating shop. 700$ for all 4 wheels. Forget that. So I thought that with a lot of time, I could probably sand back the machined faces smooth and get the rest smooth enough to fill with a high build primer and paint and achieve a decent enough finish. Well, the high build primer part is fine. It only needs a bit of work with a 120 grit pad and a DA sander and I can get it smooth enough for paint. The machined face is insane amount of work. I need to go over it with the DA with a 60 grit, then 120, then 220, then hit it with a scotch brite and a bit of polish to expose the remaining pits. Start the process like 5 times and eventually I'll get something half decent, but of course it'll never be perfectly smooth.
After the first stages of sanding, it will be like that:
The outer lip is the worse, as the guy probably doubled down on the blasting there:
After way too many hours, I got one wheel to that point:
I'm confident that if I hit it with 220 up to 2000 it will polish alright, but I'll still see some pits somewhere.
Now what got me worried is that I found big gouges like that:
Not sure if it was there before or not. They almost look like punch marks. Maybe to get a weight off...
Also, as you see here on this "good" outer lip, the machined face is actually "raised" maybe 1 mm:
On 2 of the wheels, the guy blasted that 1 mm down flush:
Now I'm kinda scared that either the wheels won't balance, or the tires won't seal because of all those pits or even that all those micro pits will become stress risers waiting the right moment to initiate a crack. I don't want to go through all of this and find out that the wheels are unusable afterwards. I don't really mind finding other wheels, as they only cost 360$. However, I haven't seen this wheel model before and I think the look suits the car well. What would you do? Keep sanding and run them, or replace?
If I was to do it all again, I would just hit the faces with a 120 grit pad on the DA and remove the clear that way. No chance in hell I'm sandblasting anything other than steel again.
