Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Controlling Corrosion: Stripping and prepping wheels for paint

Among the many re-finish jobs on the Dino, the wheels require special attention. They are made of an aluminum/magnesium alloy that corrodes if not treated properly. To this end a very laborious process is required to get them ready for paint. The process is as follows:

1. Remove old tires, tire stems, and wheel weights from rims
2. Thoroughly wash wheels and inspect for any damage
3. Chemically strip wheels. We use Goudeys paint stripper as profiled in previous threads
4. Wash the wheels again
5. Once dried touch up any missed spots in the blast cabinet using medium pressure and gentle media
6. Wash the wheels again
7. Apply Alodine solution as per directions to treat the wheels for paint.
8. Wash the wheels again

As you can see there are a lot of steps before any primer or paint goes on. This process was introduced to us by Steve Kouracos and is profiled in the following link on his website:

Aluminum-magnesium-wheel-restoration

We thank Steve for sharing this information with us and look forward to the priming and painting steps.







4 comments:

  1. My question for you (and I have asked Steve Kouracos too) is why use Alodine 1201? It is an aluminium surface pretreatment. It chemically reacts with aluminium. Alodine (Henkel / Bondrite) do have magnesium treatments - so why use something designed for a different metal? The original Dow chemical chrome dichromate solution is no longer made by Dow because it is extremely carcinogenic. Here is a technical discussion of the issues involved with magnesium treatments by chemists and metallurgists: https://www.finishing.com/faqs/magnesium.shtml

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