Last week, I scored the Wheel Deal—a set of the 17x8" Style 42 cross-spoke alloy wheels that were conspicuously absent from the $1,500 530i stick sport I bought last month. I drove 2½ hours each way up to Maine, handed over a hundred and fifty bucks, and dragged home four corroded, bent wheels with garbage tires.
An argument between the left and right hemispheres of my brain immediately ensued: Were these a steal, or was I was simply an idiot?
I am, above most things, a practical person. I do not crave things I cannot have, and I do not seek perfection in any area other than songwriting. All that I wanted out of the Style 42s was for them to not look worse than the car, to be straight enough so as not to cause vibration, and to cost as little as possible. But as I detailed last week, all three of these areas posed challenges.
Since the removable cross-spoke centers were in excellent condition—virtually all the corrosion was on the rims—I initially thought that I could simply sand the outer lips, at least the parts that are in front of the cross-spoke centers, and paint them. Unfortunately, this proved to be impossible; the corrosion on most of the wheels was deep enough that simple hand-sanding wouldn’t take it off, unless I had the patience of a prison inmate digging a tunnel with a spoon, which I certainly do not.
So I tried a fairly coarse Scotch-Brite-type wheel I had in the garage, originally purchased to sand some rust off the Suburban’s rocker panels. It dug into the corrosion very effectively, but it was instantly clear that it was far too aggressive, and risked badly damaging the lovely cross-spoke centers if it kissed them.
So I ordered three Scotch-Brite wheels on Amazon, in different gradations of aggressiveness, down to fine finishing. They were fairly inexpensive. But even using these, there was really no way to get the corrosion off without scuffing up the centers. It was clear that if I wanted to be efficient, and not cause myself work by having to refinish the centers that didn’t need refinishing, I had to remove the centers. They’re each held in by nineteen 8-mm XZN 12-point triple-square Locktited screws.
I read forums and watched videos of people disassembling Style 42s, and learned that what you need to do is use a torch to heat up the portion of the rim around each screw to loosen the Locktite, then crack the screws by hand with a 12-point bit on a ratchet.
Nineteen screws per wheel, four wheels, 76 screws.
The consensus of opinion was that if you didn’t use heat to break the grip of the Locktite, you’d strip the screws’ 12-point heads. I imagined spending hours each evening on this ritual, just to pull the cross-spoke centers out. Screw that.
A lot of what I do—and probably what you do—repair-wise, is drive down a road until I can’t go any farther, turn around, try another way, then perhaps return to the original road. You can’t know everything you’re going to encounter until you encounter it. I thought that with the relatively small sum I paid for these wheels, I’d use my air impact wrench on the first 12-point screw. If it stripped, I’d simply stop and abandon the project.
I had a 12-point triple-square XZN bit set that I’d bought for the caliper bolts in one of the cars, but I didn’t like the way the 8-mm driver fit into the screws on the wheels. I ordered another 8-mm bit in a 3/8" ratchet socket from Amazon. When it arrived, I test-fit it, and it did fit more snugly than the one I had. I fired up the compressor, attached the bit to my half-inch air impact wrench with an adapter, fit it into the screw head, held my breath, and squeezed the trigger.
Out it came, as they say, like buttah. I had all 76 screws out in short order. Well, I thought, that was easy.
Next, though, came the hard part: actually removing the cross-spoke centers from the rims. I’ve read that there is originally a caulk bead between the center and the rim. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but on mine, corrosion had a death grip. I put each rim flat on a towel on the garage floor, and smacked the back side of the center with a rubber mallet. That got one of the centers out.
Okay, I thought, this isn’t bad at all. Unfortunately, the other three were just miserable to remove.
I went from using the rubber mallet to swinging a small sledge onto a hockey puck. The puck didn’t transfer enough impact, so I switched to smacking a wooden block. I had to put my entire back into it—BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!—risking angrying up my sciatica. The wooden block kept splintering; I had to cut new blocks off a 2x4 to keep going. With each bang, my left brain reminded me, “You’re an idiot. This totally isn’t worth it.”
At one point, I stopped, took a break, and looked on Craigslist—for the hundredth time—for wheels. I found a set of staggered Alpina-style Style 32s off an earlier E39, with rubber, for $300, within striking distance in New Hampshire. I had a set of these on my E39 sport wagon years back and liked the look. But by the time I decided, “Yeah, at that price, if they’re not bent, I should buy them and use them until I have the 42s done,” they were gone.
I grudgingly returned to the smacking, kept going, and eventually got all four centers out without injuring myself to the point of requiring the services of a chiropractor or a neurosurgeon.
With the centers out and the lips of the rims now completely accessible, the extent of the corrosion could be plainly seen. Many people wrote me and suggested I use Aircraft Stripper to remove the flaking clear coat and the old paint. I appreciate the input, but if the only issue on these wheels was flaking clear coat, the 530i would be wearing them right now. The problem was the corrosion that had already gotten under the clear coat and eaten into the aluminum.
Originally, I thought that I’d just run the Scotch-Brite wheels on the outer lips to clean them up, then paint them and reassemble the wheels, but it’s not like the outer lips were the only places that were corroded. On the one hand, I really couldn't care less if there is corrosion on parts of a set of wheels I can’t see; but on the other hand, sanding and painting only part of each wheel seemed a false economy, even for me. And yet I’m a guy who has waxed cars maybe four times in his life; I had absolutely no desire to spend multiple evenings sanding not only the outer lip but every surface of every wheel.
So: Craigslist again. I searched for terms like sandblasting and media blasting, and found a local guy who said he can blast all four wheels for $50 to $60 for the set. He had me measure them to be certain they’d fit in his cabinet, and thought that glass beads were probably the appropriate blasting medium. I thought I was on a glide path to success.
But then, at the end of the conversation, he said that things were kind of busy, because his “girlfriend was in the hospital.”
I thought, “Then why on earth are you having this conversation with me?” I didn’t say that out loud; I obviously, as any decent human being would do, gave him my best, and expressed my wishes for his girlfriend’s speedy recovery. But I’m sure you can appreciate that, after sending two gentle text messages a week apart and not hearing back, I’m now doubtful whether this will happen.
We just had two beautiful March days in Boston, with two more forecast for this weekend. As spring flows in, I’m going to be wanting to pull the vintage cars out of storage and start playing with them. We’ll see if I can bring this wheel-refinishing project I never wanted to do on a path to a rapid, cost-effective conclusion.—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.
