After three years and countless hours I have now finished my phone dial polish job. I would not wish this project on anyone. It is by far the hardest "spruce up project" I have ever done and knowing what I know now I would never do it again. I do think the results are very nice however and I kind of dig the change in appearance.

Please pardon the dirty car and messy garage.

 

Pardon the stupid question, but why was this so difficult?

 

Wow.....beautifully done. I know it took plenty of work to get the details 'right'!

 

because you're forever sanding.

I assume the OP didn't use paint stripper to remove the paint and instead he sanded it off.

 

It's a massive investment in time to properly remove the tough as hell original paint, then sand through a lot of grades of sandpaper on a complex shape and then polish to a mirror finish.

I just did the lips on my d90s and it took a good 40 man hours and I could have done a better job.

 

Paint stripper guys. saves a lot of man hours. sanding aluminium is easy. sanding paint is hard.

 

Your end result looks fantastic, well done.

 

End result looks fantastic. Very impressive.

Hopefully I'll get mine looking like that eventually

 

Thanks for the kind words. Pauly as for stripper, I did use aircraft stripper that is only half the battle. As you said aluminum does sand fairly easy, however there is so much texture under the paint on these wheels that it takes forever and a day. As someone else pointed out there really are no flat surfaces so all of this ends up being hand work.

As a side note these wheels do not strip well, porsche put an incredibly stronger primer on under the paint that is extremely difficult to get off.

 

As for the process I used.
Strip with chemical stripper, I ended up using steel wool with the stripper ( obviously you need to clean all of this up thoroughly after stripping), sand all the texture out to a smooth finish with 80 grit, sand all the heavy sand scratches from 80 grit with 180, sand 320, wet sand 600, wet sand 800, wet sand 1000, wet sand 2000. You have to inspect and resand in between these steps with different grades of paper as the surface has to be near perfect to get a decent polish job.

 

I always thought polished phones look really nice.

Great look, especially on a black car !

 

I really think thats a great look. As time goes on, your wheels will always be "giving back" so hopefully that counters some of your hard labor!

Again, I think its quite nice.

 

Thanks guys, that was what kept me motivated. These are not going to be my primary wheels, since the car drives better with my cups and looks a good 20 years newer, but I do love the look and will probably use them a lot more than I ever did before.

 

Well done, A+

 

Just Blingin'. Wowza. Awesome work.