Video Transcript:
You know it's no secret that the world has a very passionate car culture and one of the first things we do when we modify or personalize our cars is we do something with the wheels. Now sometimes we can find the wheel design that we like but the finish maybe not so much. This is where prismatic powders can help because we have over 6,500 colors that you could use to personalize your wheels. I'm sure we have something that would work for you.
There's a couple of considerations that you want to make before you start coating the wheels. First of all, you want to mask the mounting faces of the wheels the reason why you want to do that and you don't have any powder there's because if the powder starts to wear off it becomes a safety issue where your lug bolts could come loose and then you know eventually you could potentially have a wheel come off so avoid that by making sure it is free from any powder. Now some of them are just a complete ring around there this one we had to kind of cut-up, either way, your wheel will tell you what you need to do. The other thing is how you rack the wheel. The wheel design is going to tell you what it can do because no matter what you're going to have a rack mark somewhere. If I spin the wheel around here you can see we have a pretty shallow valve stem hole here so we've opted to just go with a 5/16th eye bolt that the mark that it makes is going to get covered by the valve stem so that's allowable in this case. Some of them are deep enough that you might not want to go that route and instead you might want to use some heavy gauge wire or a chain wrap it around the outer barrel of the rim and then hang off of that.
Ok so we're ready to go ahead and start coating on these wheels they've been blasted, outgassed, they're cleaned, everything is ready to go. All of the masking has been done. So I'm going to get suited up to get these things coated. With the first coat we're going with the Stealth Charcoal base coat and then a Casper Clear topcoat. Okay, so at this point, we've got the stealth charcoal partially cured and all we did was let it go a few minutes past the point of flow-out and then we brought it out, let it cool, and now we're gonna put the Casper clear topcoat. The reason why we only do a partial cure in between coats is so that we have good intercalated adhesion between the two layers there's only a couple of colors you don't do that with, we won't get into that now, but the rule of thumb generally is a partial cure for your base coat and then full cure once your topcoat goes on and then the two coats bond together. So now we're going to go through and just hit it with the Casper Clear and see what we come up with.
Okay we've got the Casper Clear topcoat put on this Stealth Charcoal we brought them out and let them cool down everything looks great on them you'll notice it still retained that that kind of just a flat finish that's inherent to Stealth Charcoal. Be aware that when you put a low gloss clear over something that has a metallic there is a purpose for doing that and that is to protect the metallic from oxidation but it does sometimes somewhat diminished the flip-flop or the twinkle of the metallic it's still there and present it just doesn't Sparkle like it normally would. Another thing that I was gonna mention I didn't beforehand is that when you're spraying you don't want to drive powder into these lug bolt holes because you want that to be a bare surface so that when you tighten down the lug bolt it doesn't wear the powder and then create a situation where it could wear the powder way enough that you could have a lug bolt come loose. The same principle as masking the mounting flange on it you just want to keep that bare.
The great thing about powder versus paint is that once it's out of the oven, fully cured, cooled down and you can touch it it's done there's you're not waiting days or hours for it to cure out. The oven does all the curing for it, so now since we can touch them, the next thing that has to happen is to get them mounted up on the tires and mount it onto the vehicle.
So we've got the tires mounted on the wheels and everything mounted on the vehicle looks great the young lady who works in our marketing department who these belong to is very happy because she got the wheel design that she wanted but more specifically she got the color that she wanted, and I must say, it does look pretty tough.
