Restoring original pizzacutter center caps

[banpei]

Thanks! I was planning to sand them down, use primer+filler and sand them down another time to smooth out the scratches. But it's a good idea to use plastic primer instead.

[banpei]

I made an attempt with the worst of the "undamaged" center caps. I was able to remove the aluminum front but it was considerable more difficult than the one that was badly damaged. It turns out the aluminum is bonded to the plastic. So I used a hairdryer to heat up the glue and then I was able to separate the two. However that did bend the aluminum a slight bit. I tried fixing this using a hammer and a dolly. After I was satisfied with the result I sanded down the front and now it looks like this:

There is still a lot of pitting and I haven't even tried putting the two back together again. I'm not happy with this result.

So I had a change of plans: if after painting and more sanding it still doesn't look okayish enough I'll use filler on the pitting and then paint them in a light grey colour. I'm even doubting if I actually should separate the two remaining caps and instead just use masking tape. (which is also a lot of work to do it tidy enough)

[banpei]

There actually is some progress!
Last time when I visited the garage, I actually inspected the wheels. Apparently they have been painted over by someone (they did a decent job to be honest) so also the two centercaps I got with the wheels have been painter over. So I took one for color matching and got some rattle cans plastic primer and silver (I still have some black leftovers in the basement). I'm not a 100% sure the silver is the exact same as the example (I'm actually colorblind), but it was the closest match with the color chart. It looked equally greyish and sparkly so let's hope for the best.

So today I started sanding down the two "best" ones. Right one is done with 600 grit and left one untreated:


And both of them sanded down with 600 grit:

There is still a lot of pitting and scoring left on the aluminum plate.

So I filled all that up with some bog:

Initially I was planning to do it proper with aluminum putty filler, but I dropped that when I decided last time that I would respray them anyway.

Sanded down the filler with 180 grit paper:


And late night sanding down once more with 250 grit and finally with 600 grit:

All the surfaces are smooth now and I'll start doing some paint work tomorrow.

[r.ave]

Looks good!

[banpei]

Continuing where I left off last time...
Masked up the aluminum cross, primed and painted the black plastic:

The result looks good, but there are some flaws:

Then I let the paint cure for a week, masked up the black painted parts and painted the aluminum in silver:

After removing the masking it actually looks pretty decent. There are still some (shallow) dents in the aluminum and there are some small ridges where I didn't sand down the filler flat enough, but I'm happy with the result.

It actually is better than the paint the original:

Close up you can see there is a difference in sparkle of the silver paint and the black is a bit more shiny, but it's close enough.


The end goal wasn't to get them in perfect condition, but to get them good enough to put these wheels on my Carina. I mean, my Carina looks way worse than these wheels! So what's the use of having prefect wheels on it?

[r.ave]

Seems good enough to me.
And nobody will notice while driving or from fa away

[Power_uP]

Looks decent. They'll never look new again unless you want to spend a shitload of money though. At least you saved a set of wheels and caps.

[banpei]

Thanks and yes they're good enough as a temporary measure. This is what they look like on a Carina:

Looking at this picture I suspect the ones I cleaned up actually used to have the same paint scheme as the ones on the red Carina.
I'm not sure if I like them on a white Carina and like them over the 15 inch Celica Supra L-type rims, but if I do I'll search for a proper set of centercaps.