There's a place I found in Newark. Lousy name, great work NeedPowderCoating My wife is VERY hard on her Mercedes rims and tires. This year I took her winters in to have a Nokian swapped out and it checked for bent rims. How the heck does a woman slice the inside sidewall of a tire in 3 separate locations??? These rims were in last year & she curbed them 2 weeks after getting them back. I cried. $125 ea for rim straightening fixing abrasions, Welding a crack & powder coating. They do a phenomenal job. Tire mounting is with a touchless machine. And the young owner is stand-up honest. I just took my wife's 4 summer tires in. 3 rims were bent with one VERY bad. the local shop tried to balance as best they could, but there still was a considerable shimmy. She also curb-rashed all four. I got them back within a week. I just put 22PLE on them so the brake dust doesn't stick so I was up close & personal. They look like 4 new rims. I just dropped off my 355 door sills with a bit of rust on them. He said not to worry, he'll take care of them. And I have the utmost confidence he will take care of them. His staff is exceptionally nice. His one fault - don't call. His mailbox is always full. He's a young'n....text. He'll answer right away. Pay Cash. it's a better deal. He can powder coat anything and any color. His work is amazing. If he can handle the older 308 magnesium, I'm taking them in.
Billy's work is excellent, he powder coated our garden set and it came out excellent. Even sent his driver to pick up and drop off all four pieces.
Thanks Clyde. This is great info. I paid $118 at the beginning of the season just to have a wheel on the wife's DD straightened. No paint, no welding, just straightening. Sounds like this place is a far cry better.
Tonight, I'm mad. Got her summer tires rims back from powder coating & looked at her mounted rims to see how much cleaning I have to do before I swap them for the summer tires. There it is. 1/3 the rear rim is ALREADY chewed up pretty bad. Not even two weeks. She says "I don't know how that happened. I was very careful and parked away from everybody". Uh huh. So I'm done with her rims & car. it's all her problem now.
There was a question about Magnesium Rims and I stopped by today. Billy said he does no special work on there...10 min. dip & paint. He tells me he does it on Motorcycle parts all the time. I asked him about Chromate prep. He doesn't know anything about it. I sent my 308 rims out to USA Wheels in Fairfield (?) after countless recommendations & their assurance they could handle it. The paint bubbled after a year. I sent them out to Wheel Collision Center in Bath Pa. Again, highly recommended. They told me they were improperly sealed and would always be an issue. They tried their best with a treatment & powder coating. Perfect when they left there. 2 years later and the surface looks very rough I presume because they are oxidizing.
Clyde, I've used both of those places in Bath and Fairfield but not for magnesium alloy rims and they were fine. I have 2 vintage cars with magnesium rims and one from the mid 90's a track car that came with lightweight magnesium rims and they were painted with ordinary paint when new. The paint was quite thin, intentionally. I had to repaint those and eschewed powder coating because I'd heard it tends to obscure the development of cracks. Not good for a rough service track car. I went through the whole chromate primer though and they haven't bubbled a bit. They get beat up pretty well at the track anyway. Then I tackled the rims on my Espada. There's a thread about it on here somewhere. Fchat's search function probably won't let me find it though. I've heard nothing but trouble about people trying to powder coat older Campagnolo rims. A friend tried that twice on a set of the same rims for his Islero. They looked like **** both times. Some of that may be due to the crude nature of those rims. They're SOBs to strip properly and when you do the castings are unbelievably crude. They came NEW with bondo on them to smooth out the major casting imperfections! So I never thought powder coating was going to work WO me using a filler that could handle the heat and even then who knows whether it might not separate a bit and cause paint failures. I consulted a well know Miura specialist about how to tackle the rims. No it wasn't Gary B but someone else on the west coast who's well known in that world. I used a chromate conversion process twice on those rims like they use in aircraft repairs. You can buy it and mix it with water. I applied it twice. Once after cleaning and stripping and a second time after cosmetic repairs. Then I applied the chromate primer, plenty of it. This was a hell of a lot of work. I don't think I'd do it again. If you want the name of someone who did the Miura wheels on a friend of mine's car, he's local, I could try and find out. But that's with a modern single stage enamel which is period correct. I imagine he could do clear coat too though. My friend no longer owns the car but he went through the failure the first time woes too. I'm not familiar with powder coating success stories on the older rims, just the horror stories. I've "heard of" places that supposedly can do it but their terribly secretive about the process and maybe the older castings with bubbles and porosity are just too troublesome? Hope that helps a bit. And thanks for listing the powder coating place it's always good to have another good reference for that. Bob S.
