The finished rim.

    One of the easiest ways to customize any vehicle is with a new set of rims. In recent years it has become popular to purchase rims with centers that match your paint and a nice chrome finish on the lip of the rim.
    If the style or brand of rim is not offered with a painted center or if the color of the center is not what you want, custom painting is the solution. Whether you choose to customize a particular set of rims on the market or decide to enhance rims you already own, both can be prepped and painted. A recent customer wanted black centers and airbrushed skulls on the center caps of his brand new set of rims, and the following steps describe how this was accomplished.

Sand with caution
    Painting rims can be tricky at times because the chrome needs to remain intact on the lip of the wheel, so it cannot be sanded. The solution is to mask off your design and then wet sand the centers with 800-grit sandpaper. We did this with our customer’s rims and took care to sand right up to the edge of the masking. A common mistake people make in this step of the procedure is to blindly sand away without taking time to double-check the sanded area.
    When you sand over a pre-masked design, the sandpaper is at an angle since the tape is slightly higher than the surface area near the edge. This can become a big problem when the masking is peeled off after painting since the edges are not completely sanded and this will cause lifting. To sidestep this problem, we usually unmask the rims and then mask them again. Make sure that the masked edge meets up with the sanded edge. This is a must because the wet sanding may destroy the nice clean edge.
Clean and degrease
    To begin with, on this particular set of rims, we started by cleaning and degreasing the entire set. We were fortunate enough to have a brand new set of rims to work with, so this step wasn’t very hard. The hard part was to be very careful not to nick or scratch the chrome and ruin a brand new $1,500 rim.
    This set of rims was for a truck, so the dishes were fairly deep. The customer wanted the spokes of the rims painted black to match his truck. After cleaning the rims, we began by masking around the outside of the spokes with 3M fine-line tape. Then we masked off the rest of the rim with regular 3M masking tape and repeated this step with each rim.
Mask over protective cover on new rims
    Since these rims were brand new, they came with a protective plastic ring that covered the lip of the rim. I left this on and masked over it to protect the rim just in case it was bumped. I then grabbed some 800-grit wet sandpaper and a bucket of water. I usually add a few drops of dishwashing liquid to the water. This makes the sandpaper last longer and helps it cut faster. Most dishwashing detergents also remove grease, so this keeps the surface clean.
    For the back of each rim we used 600-grit sandpaper, since the back is usually a rougher surface than the front. We made sure to sand right up to the edge and when finished we unmasked each rim and masked it again with 3M fine-line tape and regular masking tape.