UPDATE!
4 weeks of work in progress and a lot of grief and still not finished.
Powder coat really is hard as F to strip off with anything other than full acid dip or shot blasting. Which i dont have access to and couldnt find anywhere that was prepared to do just the lips. So i have spent hours with Nitromors and a packet of blades and got the rims back to bare metal. And i mean HOURS!
I then called a few places for a quote for diamond cutting JUST the lips and was quoted anything from £240 -£450! So i cracked out the sandpaper and spent another 6 hours polishing the lips. Which will now be finished with various polishing wheels to a high polish. After sanding down to 1200 grit, i needed some inspiration so offered up the centre:
Next issue - the previous owner had obviously split the wheels and had some of the bolt holes re-coiled. By a blind man. Most of the coils were badly loose, sticking out or just fell out. Given that one wheel had 6 loose coils, I looked into my options.
1) TIG weld all the loose holes back up and then retap to M7. Cost of TIG welding for 12 holes alone - £150!
2) Cold weld the M7 helicoils into the loose holes. FAILED
3) Buy new M 8 bolts and then retap ALL 76 holes. WIP.
In the mean time, i had sent the M7 bolts off to be anodised as i wanted them gold. I got a call from the anodiser moaning that they had been painted black (oops) and they had no facility to clean the paint off....... So i asked the price and total for re-anodise and stripping etc was £110. A new set of M7 gold (non genuine BBS) is £150 ish so i asked them to send them back. This is how they arrived:
I got on the phone and asked WTF had happened!? Apparently they sent them away for shot blasting before asking me....... So i now have 76 F'd bolts that need either rubbing down or etc primed and painted.
Sooooooo i bought 100 new M 8 bolts, which wasnt too bad ££ wise. However, this also meant that the holes on the wheel centres had to be drilled out to accomodate mate bolts. 76 holes redrilled. DONE.
I then didnt like the industrial look of the new bolts so bought some acid etch primer and some gold plasti kote. 76 bolts painted with 2 coats of etch primer and 3 coats of gold - DONE. They have been left for a week and the paint is pretty damn hard so happy with that.
Soooooo as they stand at the moment, the centres look like this:
I felt inspired to try the centre caps with the gold rim to see if i liked it:
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(i broke the little audi badge when i put it back in........ )
Thats all for now!
Next stop - two more wheels to tap to M 8 and then the lips to be highly polished.