Anyone here had any luck refurbishing alloy wheels themselves?

you can make it look nice yourself, but the finish you can do at home is not super tough. I had some done for a Lexus a while ago at JP polishing at canvey, the wheels are chemically stripped overnight, bead blasted, welded up if needed, lathe finished and hand polished, then special lacquer in your choice of colours is baked on overnight, then the tyres are properly refitted and re-balanced with stick on weights on the inside, this was near enough 40 quid a wheel. I did one for myself, it took ages to get all the crud off, especially the inside and was a very dirty job, sprayed it with alloy wheel paint, which looks excellent, then clear lacquer and it now looked really like the original, but the slightest touch has the paint peeling off, so I guess it really needed some etch primer or something, oh well it is still an improvement, but next time I will take them in to John !!

the place I used was:

Ditto, I can polish a Patt 23 to chrome finish quite happily but alloy wheel repair by a professional is a bargain.

Why do you play with pattern 23's?, do tell.

Crikey, you must have really poor eyesight if that's the sort of inspection light you need!

Chris

The domain name's a clue :-) I was polishing some of the old ones for the local theatre to put in the bar for the occasional show they do in there.

I'm trying to resist polishing the Patt 93 :-) Led headtorches seem to beat inspection lamps in most applications now.

the theatre I worked in is still using them on stage, still useful enough to hang onto, I do miss working there on these cold days!

I sprayed the wheels on my Focus but they didn't have any curbing to speak of just flaky varnish and tarnishing. Even so it took two days or so of scrubbing and sanding , fiddly masking off and use of expensive etch primer and like another poster said, acrylic paint that is no substitute for the baked on pros stuff. They still look OK a year on and it was very satisfying work. If it's curbing then check Ebay first to see if you can replace them perhaps ? I almost found a good set with tyres for the Focus, but it was the delivery cost that's was the killer.

Simon

I can understand that :-)