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build diary December 18, 2004: There are so many things I should be doing instead of playing with my Seven. The wheels are polished. The solution to the nasty kerb scars was an 80 grit flapper wheel on a die grinder. Overkill perhaps, but it sure did the trick. This was followed with some 220 grit to clean things up, then some coarse and fine Scotch Brite wheels. A rub with a coarse Scotch Brite pad put a nice satin finish on things, then I wet-sanded with 600, 1000 and 2000 grit. Some rubbing compound (the missing link from yesterday), aluminum polish and a final shot with Nevr-Dull wadding and boom! A very shiny wheel. It turns out I started with the worst wheel of the lot. Two had no kerb marks at all and those cleaned up in about 30 minutes. I did all the work with the wheel spinning to avoid variations in the shape of the rim. With the polish, those would have been very obvious. So after all the polishing, I cleaned everyhing up with brake cleaner, carefully masked the rims and started painting. Two coats of self-etching primer, two coats of the Dupli-Color and then a coat or two of clear. How will it look? Hard to say, I'm heading off to put the second coat of black on right now. While waiting for paint to dry (how exciting!) I checked a few things on teh car. The connection between the upper control arm and the upright was backing out a bit, so I tightened that up after taking out a bit of camber. I also raised the ride height by about 1/2" to give me some more peace of mind. Just for fun I threw the car on the scales - the cross weights are 50.2/49.8 with me in the driver's seat. Not bad for an eyeball setting, really! entry 732 of 1439 |