aggregate clown car • Prepping my Audi for the AZ10 meet... wheel resurrection!

Prepping my Audi for the AZ10 meet… wheel resurrection!

Last week, I needed to get my car prepped stat for a rather large meeting of fellow Audi people. Not so much a car show, but a get together of sorts… actually a rather large one. This involved tackling a few projects rather quickly.

The largest one of which was the wheels.

A friend of mine just a few miles away had these in his garage… just happened to be one of my favorite Audi wheels. And since they were 17’s, they’d be a direct swap for my tires. I was a bit hesitant at first but he laid into me to make it happen and I’m glad he did.

This was after four rounds of scrubbing, degreaser, hot water and finally some wheel cleaner that said “do not leave on wheels for more than five minutes.” I hosed em down with that stuff and went inside to make lunch, came an hour later. Then did it again. Then they finally started to look clean.

We’ll jump back a bit.

Before sitting in Dustin’s garage for a year or so, these wheels lived in Washington state and were obviously subject to snow and salted roads. That and they’re ~10 years old.

You can tell by the way the paint is bubbling on the inner sides of the spokes towards the outside (darker areas). The paint gets eaten or compromised and the road grime seeps in. Then it kinda melds together. Pretty nasty when you’re actually trying to clean something like this enough to paint it.

Here’s a test fit we did a while back to see if these wheels would actually clear my giant calipers. All you need is a few mm, and it was there. Barely. Dustin has somewhat primed this one so it was somewhat white-ish?

Okay, back to the refinishing. After a few days of cleaning came sanding. Yay. My favorite. I tried a variety of 300 grit options but the best tool for the job turned out to be the Emery Cloth as it was pliable like a rag. Worked really well to get into the small edges on the wheel spokes.

Wrapping a set of pliers became the perfect sanding tool.

And more sanding. Later I put on a bucket drumming show for the plants.

Found an easy way to get rid of all the dust… Toro!

And then a quick final wash and dry out in the sun. At this point, the finish was completely different on all four wheels. Especially that one on the bottom left, who obviously was into mushrooms.

Then the wind picked up so our operation needed to move in the garage.

Check the high tech painting equipment.

Truth be told, the sprayer attachment for rattle cans is one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. The painter’s tape is just to keep it from coming loose when moving around and trying to get all the angles. This allows for nice even coats.

This is a filler primer which will fill in some of the smaller dents and blemishes. Great stuff for an older set of wheels like these. Went through two cans of this stuff. Needed a solid base coat for these guys. All of the sudden they started looking a bit more uniform.

The next day I started working on swapping out the side skirt. Last year, one of my jacks collapsed and it took a chunk out of the pass side rocker panel (it’s easy to see in the wheel test-fit pic above).

Fortunately, I was able to source a used one dirt cheap from a guy in VA who had crashed his car.

Yeeeah, that hole didn’t come from the factory.

In between working on the side skirt, I was moving the wheels in and out of the garage to add coats of paint and let them dry in the sun. The buckets came in super handy. I was a bit skeptical of how they’d turn out. Even with a few coats they STILL weren’t matching. This isn’t due to different angles and the sun… they’re not the same color. Not good.

But they sure looked puuurdy.

And back to the panel… since I don’t have a lift, had to come up with a way to see what I was doing on the underside of the car. No problem.

All fixed. Finally!

Pretty easy to see how low the car was at this point. Low low. Something else that needed to be done was raising all the coil overs up about an inch or so. The new wheels were just a tad wider and I didn’t want to rub. That and this was just too low anyway. You kinda have to over adjust and then they settle after a day or so, it’s this fun game we get to play with our cars.

I ran into some serious issues with the rear coil overs. One of the adjusters was completely frozen so I had to disassemble + remove it, then rig up this system to break it free. Once it was loose all was good but doing so was not that simple as it required a decent amount of force at a rather particular angle to get it moving again.

How this raises and lowers the car is pretty simple and kinda cool too. It’s just a giant screw and nut. The spanner wrench holds the nut in place and the hex key adjusts it which in turn raises and lowers the car. Before on the car (pics above) these pieces were touching but now I’ve added about a finger’s width of space. Should be good at this height.

By removing the wheel, you can easily access the adjuster, or maybe with the wheel on if you’re Gumby. But it’s easier to just pop it off real quick. Normally, the adjustments are made right here w/out having to remove anything.

Was still working on the wheels this whole time and after a few more coats and hours in the sun, they finally started to look the biznass. It’s the same Satin Silver I used to paint the rings on the front of the car. PS - I can’t stand chrome. It makes me skin crawl.

Finally matching!

(scroll back up to look at the other pic… pretty easy to see the five color wheel schema I had goin)

Was able to reassemble the rear end and make the necessary adjustment to raise the car so it wasn’t quite so dumped. And who would-a known that outdoor heat lamps work quite well to dry wheels. Wanted to clock a few hours under it to be certain the wheels were dry for they’re fitting the next day. Was cuttin it kinda close.

Last night with the old, chewed up wheels.

Fortunately, I was able to get the wheels mounted sans issue the next AM and they do look quite fetching. I am incredibly pleased.

Good stuff.

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