My damaged Bullitt rims transformed!! From disaster to...

...amazing!

Ok, so a few Sundays ago my wife and I went to a huge Mustang show in Aibonito with over 200 Mustangs in attendance. The show was spectacular and as an unexpected bonus I won 3rd place Best of Show!!
That was the good news.
The bad news is that on the way home we wanted to stop by a large flea market we like to go to in Aricebo to get dinner and look around a bit. Sadly as my traffic light at the stop light near the flea market turned green and I pulled out and making the turn, a car flew through a red light heading straight head on towards us. I quickly knee jerk reacted and gunned the stang to the left as I saw the other car swing to the right. Unfortunately whipping to the left crashed me up onto a curb which was not kind to my beautiful stock Anthracite Bullitt rims.Here is a before image of my Stang before the show showing how nice my rims were:



The two rims on the passenger side got badly bent/warped and also received some major curb rash to add insult to injury. The two on the drivers side are also bent/warped but I am told these two could be possibly balanced out with enough weights. With enough weights? That sounds great, not.
Sooo, I finally find a place that repairs rims but they recommend that I first take the two really badly bent/warped rims to another second shop so they can repair the lips/curb rash and very bad bends first before they finish repairing them.

After getting the two badly damaged rims back from the other shop I take the two repaired rims with the other two rims to the first shop for the final fixes.
This first picture shows three of the rims ready for the final fix. One of them was one of the two of really badly damaged rims:

This is the fourth rim that was badly damaged. As you can see it looks good. Especially considering that 1/4 of the lip had been scraped right off with even more major curb rash:


So now the first shop also does powder coating so after they were done getting the rims straight again I had picked out a special color combo for them to do on the rims, since afterall the front face of the rims were badly scuffed from the curb run-in plus they are now showing some finish issues from having the lips repaired, the curb rash fixed and from being re-bent and straightened.

Here is my poor Stang siting and waiting for it's repaired rims to be put back on:


Here are some pics I was able to take of the powder coating process.
Here is one of the rims after having the yellow section done and cooked on:

Here is another rim with the yellow part done:


Once the rims are cool from cooking the yellow powder they spray the black powder on:




Then they had to wipe off the outer lip of any black while keeping it smooth and even:

They had to be very carefull not to bump into or accidently wipe off any black powder from any other areas other than the outer lip:



And now I present the final look.
Here is one of my repaired rims now all done and ready to have the tire put back on, balanced and installed back on my Mustang:




I am told that the other three "should" be done sometime tomorrow afternoon.
Oh yeah, I can't wait to put these bad boys back on my Stang.

Then they will start powder coating a few select items in my engine bay to put some added shiny colors in there

Well, before I can get the rims back on the car I had to first get the tires back on them and then have them all balanced.
Of course I had to get all of this accomplished without getting my beautiful newly refurbished rims from getting scraped or damaged in anyway.
For all of this to happen I had to first go to one garage that had a machine that would not scratch or damage the rims while putting the tires back on:

They were even very careful when putting a new valve stem in:

They even snapped on some special soft pads for where it gripped to the rim:

I'm interested to see how they look once they're mounted back on the car, and how closely the yellow matches the car's paint. Looks like they did a pretty good job on the wheels though!

My thoughts exactly, if the yellow is a different shade, its gonna look ....interesting.

The transformers bumblebee keeps popping in my head when I look at the rims....

That's awesome, lets see some finished pictures !!

A shot of the back of the rim showing the glossy black powder coating:



Ok, so now what you have all been waiting for.....

Here is a before:


and after:

interesting

Very different...i like it

Me 2 !
That's wild!!!



FWIW I got curb rash on one of my bullitt rims, just on the lip, and I used a dremel tool to gradually grind it down and blend it into the rest of the undamaged part.
I purchased clear coat from Advanced Auto and you can barely tell I had a problem there.

It's a lot of work though and it's NOT easy especially for artistically challenged me

Great post . Its nice to see pics of the whole process .

The end result is awesome , one of a kind bullit wheels!

That looks good, different for sure.

Looks good. If I were you i'd take off that decal, makes the car look really cheap.