Refinishing The Wheel Deal: Conclusion

Last week I wrote the ending of the E39 Style 42 wheel-refinishing story and solemnly intoned the lesson learned: Don’t buy an inexpensive set of corroded wheels and try to refinish them yourself. The time required to do even a passable job simply isn’t worth it. Even I would never do it again. Even I would pay someone else to do it, or buy a set in better condition. Be smart—don’t be a cheap idiot like me.

But when I wrote that, in fact the story had not yet ended.

Let’s back up and let the story take its final lap, because even things that aren’t worth it can still be the best choice under the circumstances. I had very modest expectations for this project. I kept thinking, “I paid fifteen hundred bucks for the 530i stick sport with 176,000 miles. It was a very good deal, but I would’ve been even happier had I paid another, oh, say, $250, and it had the Style 42s on it.” So that’s the place I was trying to get to—not a place of perfection, just the right wheels in a condition commensurate with the rest of the car. So I kept thinking about the work on the Style 42s in terms of “preserving the deal,” or at least not blowing it out of the water.

How much time does it take to sand all of the corrosion off a set of horrifically corroded wheels? Well, how much time do you have? And what end result will satisfy you? With my wheels, the corrosion created pits that went so deep into the aluminum that it was clear that no amount of abrasion—whether it was me using Scotch Brite wheels on a drill (the refinishing equivalent of digging yourself out of jail with a spork) or proper media-blasting—would ever get every last bit of it without reducing the amount of aluminum to the thickness of a soda can.

In this case, because this wheel design has removable centers, with the centers removed, it was possible to sand the rim’s outer lip with a Scotch Brite wheel. On most other wheel designs, this isn’t even an option, so you’d have to media-blast them. And despite the amount of time it took, every time I sanded the outer lip, I got more and more of the corrosion off, and the wheels looked better and better.

However, keep in mind that I was only sanding the outer lip; the rest of the rim was still a basket-case of corrosion and flaking clear coat. So media-blasting really did make more sense. I just didn’t want to spend the money.

When doing this kind of sanding yourself, by hand, at some point there’s clearly a line of diminishing returns. Where, exactly, is that line? And how do you know?

Well, in my case, after the project had dragged on for two weeks, I simply put a deadline on it. I told myself that I would begin reassembling the wheels by the end of last weekend. This meant that all sanding activity had to come to a stop on Sunday evening. Plus, it turned out that after doing this for so many hours, I intuitively knew where that line was: It was the point at which the lip surface was as smooth as possible, with as many scratch marks removed as possible, leaving only the deep pits. I would do no wet-sanding with finer and finer grades of sandpaper, and obviously there would be no polishing.

Coupled with my self-imposed time limit, there were certain areas on certain wheels where, in spite of doing more sanding than I ever would’ve expected, the density and depth of the pits was so high that it never looked as good as I would’ve liked, but the end result was neither through lack of effort nor lack of understanding.

Despite what I said last week, eventually I used all three Scotch-Brite wheels (the 3M Scotch-Brite Fine Finishing Sander, PN 9416NA, the 3M Contour Surface Paint and Varnish Remover, PN 9413NA, and the 3M Finishing Sander, PN 9415NA) extensively. The first was the most effective at getting all but the deepest pits out. The second, a flexible contour disc, was great for the curved outward-facing portions of the lip, and gave the surface a bit of a shine. The last one initially appeared to dull the shine somewhat, but the scratches it left were the smallest.

Because I managed to get large areas of the outer lips smoother than I ever would’ve expected, I rescinded my “no polishing” edict and polished the lips with a drill-based cone polisher and a tub of Mother’s aluminum polish. It did put a shine on them, but it was very time-consuming and, because of the uneven nature of the finish, of questionable worth. The shine is patchy and probably won’t last.

After the polishing was done, I applied the Gibbs Brand Penetrating Oil I described last week. My intent was to leverage Gibbs’ corrosion-resisting properties, hopefully having it get down into the pits and loosen the corrosion, as well as prevent new corrosion from forming (I did not clear-coat). When sprayed, Gibbs looks pinkish, not unlike SiliKroil. But it’s heavier and oilier, and appears to coat the lips and hang around on them, so much so that whenever I moved the wheels after that, I had stains on my jeans.

I then reassembled the wheels, inserting the cross-spoke centers (which required only a light cleaning with wheel cleaner) and Loctiting and torqueing down the nineteen 12-point triple-square fasteners per wheel.

Using the air-ratchet wrench sped things along considerably. I spun the fasteners until I could feel them just start to get snug, then brought them home with the torque wrench at 15 ft-lbs. In one evening and one morning, I had all 76 fasteners re-installed. The result is far from perfect if you look up close, but from a few feet away, the wheels are quite presentable.

I still needed to deal with tires. I’d decided to reuse the meaty rear set of Toyos, but the ones on the front were kissing the wear bars. I drove about twenty miles and bought a set of good used Fuzions with 7/32" of tread from a guy on CL for $60 for the pair. Turns out he was into vintage Mustangs. I hung out there for an hour. He showed me the shed behind his house where he had not only his parts stash but also a manual bead-breaker he employed to break tires off rims, and a static bubble balancer. I imagine the balancing needs of a vintage Mustang are a bit more forgiving than those of an E39, but it was cool to see someone else doing pretty much what I do.

There was a minor end game of whether to take the wheels to my friend Lindsey at the Little Foreign Car Garage to have them straightened, and if so, who should do the mounting and balancing. Before I began refinishing the wheels, I spun them and took careful notes. All four wheels were bent to one degree or another; one was badly dented on the inside rim, one had a small dent on the outside rim, and the remaining two had minor deviations from straightness. If a wheel is straightened, typically the wheel and tire then should be rebalanced. So there’s little sense paying someone to balance the wheels first if you know you’re only going to have to pay for balancing a second time after they’ve been straightened.

I reminded myself that I had, in fact, driven the car with the 42s and their garbage snow tires on it, and didn’t feel any obvious vibration from bent wheels. Oh, but when I did that, I remembered, I’d pulled the wheel with the worst dent aside, and substituted the dead-straight spare. And since then, I had attempted to straighten the two bent wheels myself by heating up the dents with the oxy-acetylene torch and beating on them with a sledge. What mattered was what state of straightness they were in now.

So I took a few minutes and spun the 42s again. My Z3 has been parked in the garage over the winter. Its bolt circle is 5x120, the same as the E39s. I jacked up the rear of the Z3, set it on jack stands, and one at a time, bolted up the 42s, spun them with the Z3’s engine, and looked at them carefully. To my delight, all four wheels looked reasonably straight. I decided to roll the dice and go right to mounting and balancing.

Finally, there was the minor question of breaking down the Beyern alloys I was replacing. I needed to reuse the two good rear tires, throw the bald fronts away, and come out with a bare set of Beyerns I could sell, give away, or scrap. I’m used to dropping loose wheels and tires off at tire shops; that way I don’t have to be without the car. That meant putting the E39 up on the lift, pulling off all four Beyerns, throwing them in the Suburban, and taking them to the small garage across the street from Bentley Publishers. They do us a favor and typically break tires off rims for $5 each. Tire shops can be prickly about this, sometimes charging you nearly what they charge for mounting and balancing for simply breaking down a set. Then I could take the good tires and the 42s to a tire shop, have them mounted and balanced, take them home, and put them on the E39, which would be on the lift waiting for them.

If you say, “Weren’t you over-thinking this?” yes, I was. I do that a lot. I was an engineer for 30 years. It’s a hard habit to break.

I took the easy route; like a sane person, I simply loaded the four refinished Style 42s and the two used Fuzions in the E39 and drove it on the Beyerns and its two good and two not-so-good tires to a nearby tire shop. When I told them that I wanted them to break down the Beyerns and have them throw away the fronts, they did want to charge me $50 just to break down the fronts. I asked them to leave them alone and just throw the unbroken pair into the trunk.

I got a call later in the day from the tire shop telling me that one of the good rear tires wasn’t as good as I thought, that it had some cracking in the sidewall rubber. At some point, if I keep the car, I’ll likely need to pony up for new tires, but for now I’m just using the car mainly to crawl the seven miles each way from Newton to Cambridge. I asked them to mount the tire.

At the end of the day, I picked up the car. I examined the rear sidewalls for the cracking the tire shop had warned me about. It’s very minor. They are, after all, in the business of selling tires; their main income stream certainly isn’t serving guys like me who try and save the last fifty bucks any way they can.

Oh—and, yes, the wheels looked great on the car.

It wasn’t until later that evening that I had the chance to drive the car at highway speeds and verify the straightness of the wheels. The fronts seem true enough; there was no palm massage from the steering wheel. The rears engender the slightest vibration into the chassis at 75, but it’s much less pronounced than the butt massage generated by the worst of the bent Beyerns, which, at exactly the wrong highway speed, would, if I spoke, literally make me sound like I was doing that underwater-sounding thing moving my index finger between my two lips.

I can feel that the tires are brand-mismatched front to back. Matched tires would be better. New tires would be better still. I am keenly aware that at some point, every car needs new tires, and that trying to “preserve the deal” has to take a back seat to safety. I think I am on the safe side of that line, though not by much.

So, finally, mercifully, the stupidest wheel-refinishing task known to man was over. As Etta James said, “At last!”

As The B-52s said, “Now, doesn’t that make you feel a whole lot better?”

As I said in a song I wrote 30 years ago, “Because it feels so good when you stop.”

Some folks have asked me how many hours I spent. I don’t know; I did not keep track of them. Soup to nuts, I’d estimate about four hours per wheel, not including the drive up to Maine and back to buy the damn things.

As I said at the beginning, I’d already decided that I’ll never do this again, so much of its value was in learning that lesson. But having said that, really, it ended pretty well. Here’s the breakdown of costs. I include the little stuff because, boy, it all added up quickly:

Now, it is instructive to examine my other options:

• I said that I should’ve just paid someone else to refinish the 42s (one vendor on CL advertised dustless blasting and power-coating “beginning at $75/wheel”), but it may be that, had I paid to have them media-blasted, the results might not have been as good, considering the depth of the pitting. Or that I would’ve been quoted a higher price. Still, next time, I’d look into it.
• I said that I should’ve simply bought a set in better condition, but Style 42s I could afford don’t exactly grow on trees. There was a fair number of Style 5 RC090s with tires on Craigslist with asking prices of $500 to $1,200, but for Style 42s, there weren’t many other click-and-buy or drive-a-reasonable-distance-and-buy choices. Really, there was just one—that set in Brooklyn for $600 that I regretted not jumping on. But it was, well, in Brooklyn; it would’ve taken most of a day getting down there and back. And who knows what shape they were really in? I imagined the challenge of finding a parking space for the E39 on Flatbush Avenue and jacking up the back and spinning each of the four wheels to be sure they were worth the asking price. 
• On eBay, there are usually several mint bare sets of Style 42s with polished lips for around $1,500. There’s currently a non-mint but very presentable bare set for $750, shipped. Bringing up the rear, there’s a set currently on eBay with tires pictured, some corrosion (waaaaaay less than mine), and clear-coat failure, for $399. But when you read the description, it says, “tires not included, one wheel has been taken apart, and there are five broken bolts that need to be removed.” Uh, no.
• For any bare set, the least expensive branded set of tires from the Tire Rack appears to be Fuzion UHPs for $334 shipped, plus another $100 for mounting and balancing. So taking the least expensive $750 shiny option from eBay, and adding fresh rubber, that’s $1,184.

Instead, I paid $445.

So, really, “I’d never do this again” needs to be qualified. Because that implies that I’d choose a different option. “Options” are funny things. For example, is “wait until you find a mint set for a steal, with new tires, five miles from your house” a real option? Discussion of this rapidly heads off into the epistemological weeds. If a car needs wheels and tires, at some point you need to set yourself on a path that provides it with wheels and tires. Waiting for a steal is not a real option. If the time frame to complete an option is potentially infinite, that option is imaginary. 

I set myself on a path, I got it done, and I came out at the end with a pretty, usable set of Style 42s, and I did so for nearly $750 less than any other real option available.

Yeah. Like I said, I over-think most things. Nice wheels, though, right?

Epilogue: I was about to submit this when I received an e-mail from an old friend (Dana Russian, whom some of you may know from E30 circles) saying that his cousin had a set of E39 wheels and tires in his shed that he wanted gone. In Wellesley. Five miles from my house. For free. I thought, what are the odds? Was my plea telegraphed to the Automotive Powers That Be, and rewarded because of the good karma I deposited in the cosmic bank from this wheel-refinishing exercise? Well, I just drove over there, opened up the shed, and found—a set of pedestrian Borbets with near-end-of-life snow tires. Because that’s how life really is.

I took them, though. Free is free, right?—Rob Siegel

Rob’s book Memoirs of a Hack Mechanic is available through Bentley Publishers, Amazon, and Bavarian Autosport—or you can get a personally inscribed copy through Rob’s website: www.robsiegel.com. His new book, The Hack Mechanic Guide to European Automotive Electrical Systems, can be pre-ordered from Bentley Publishers. Use the coupon code “BMWCCAELECTRIC” for 30% off list.