I bought this set of wheels from Yahoo auctions through a mate over in Japan back in October last year as I've been chasing a set of wheels to put on my car for some number of years now. It just so happened that I had a bit of money sitting around at the time when these popped up. I was initially looking at a set of Riversides, but was outbid on those, so these became somewhat of a consolation prize.
The wheels in question are a set of 14" Volk Racing mesh which were advertised as being 8-8.5" wide for one pair and 8.5-9" wide for the other. I Pretty much took it for granted that they'd more likely be a set of 8J and 8.5J, which later turned out to be correct. Offsets are about -10 on the front pair (8J) and -5 on the rear pair (8.5J)
Here's a picture from the original Yahoo auction.
When I got them. (About 2 weeks ago)
I already knew that these wheels would probably need to be pulled apart and cleaned up a bit, since it was fairly obvious that the seller had just masked up the lips and gone to town on the centres with a tin of gold paint without much thought for cleaning up the old paint or surface corrosion.
So the first port of call was to unbolt the centres and pop them out. After pissfarting around with a little hex key, I purchased a 1/2" drive 6mm inhex socket to undo all the bolts holding in the centres. The nuts on the back weren't regular six sided nuts (just round, flat nuts) so undoing them from that side wasn't really possible. 68 out of 80 of the bolts came out easy enough, but the remaining 12 had to be persuaded after the heads stripped out of the top of the bolts. A few hours of use with the Dremel had the rest out and resulted in the following.
Here's my super tidy workspace.
A close up of the original condition of the centres.
I initially set out trying to use paint stripper on the centres to get the paint off, but soon got fed up with that and took them off to the sandblaster to let them take care of it, since it's a pain in the arse trying to clean up around all of the spokes. I did make use of the paint stripper on the bolt flange on the outers to clean off the paint/clearcoat and all the other crap that had built up over the last 30 years. A little bit of time with some wet and dry had them looking presentable again.
During this time, I also went out and bought a box of new high tensile bolts and nuts to replace the original ones, since they were well beyond reusing. (and I had to destroy 12 to get them out anyway) I also ordered some 949 Racing valves from a local distributor to replace the original ones which were looking a little worse for wear. Only one actually turned up in the mail, as it turns out the other three fell victim to the mail sorting machine, which tore open the envelope that they were in and swallowed them, never to be seen again. Luckily, I e-mailed the guy, who sent out three extra ones for me at no extra cost. Couldn't be happier.
Once I got the centres back from the sandblaster, who also etch primed them for me, I set about dummying up the centres back in the outers to see how they'd look, and decided for the time being that I didn't mind the look of the raw etch primer colour, so I'll leave it as is until I get sick of it, then just pop the centres out again and get them painted.
Pictures of the final result.
Once I get my remaining three valves, I'll pop up another picture, then another when I get my tyres fitted.
Thanks for reading.
If I had more space, I'd chuck a bit of plate glass over the top and have a coffee table, haha.
