So I finally went for it, and I attacked my wheels. I must say right off the bat…mission accomplished (so far).

If you haven’t seen my previous entries on this topic, click here and read through them to get some background information and pictures.

First things first, I made sure I had a comfortable seat to sit on while I was attempting this work. I know that I had to be very patient with this especially since I was too lazy to take the wheel off the car. I pushed the car so the curbed portion was right side up facing the sky for easy access.

Now, like I outlined in my previous post, there were a lot of surface imperfections in my wheel that made it look a lot worse than it really was. These “imperfections” a.k.a. burrs were all over the lip because the shape of the lip got messed up from the uneven surface of the concrete.

To fix this, I started with the “half round” shaped file because it seemed to have the finest surface texture out of the rest of the files. I moved the file slowly across a 1″ section of the surface that was curbed. I quickly realized that instead, it was a lot easier to take long smooth strokes across the entire affected surface instead (about 6″). Not only were the longer strokes easier, it also helps to ensure that the surface you file remains as even as possible so you don’t end up with waves.

The metal particles that were coming off were very, very fine so I knew I was removing just a little bit of material at a time. I also made sure to let the file itself do all the work because I wanted to be cautious to not apply too much pressure otherwise the surface I was filing would quickly become flat instead of remaining rounded. So here is where I was at half way through my procedure. No turning back now!

So, if you look at the first picture, you can see that columns A-E was what I had filed down. Directly after column E, you can see the burrs that I have been referring to that make the damage look a lot worse than it really is. On the second picture, you can see the actual size of the particles when I was filing. I told you they were really fine! In the second picture you can also see that I am not going to try and attack all the little dimples in the lip that the concrete curb rash caused. If I tried to smooth all that out, the lip would lose its shape!

One thing I have to note about all this is to make sure you either tape up your wheel with blue painting tape or be VERY careful while filing. My file accidentally slipped and I made a little scratch on the lip. No biggie, it can be easily buffed out but still sucks. You can see the scratch in columns D and E in the picture below:

And after patiently filing down the rest of the damage that I was comfortable with, I finally finished. The filing process took about 20 minutes total.

And here is a closeup of the scratches left behind by the filing. This picture was taken about 1″ away from the wheel itself so they look a lot deeper than they really are in actuality:

So the majority of the surface itself is flat minus the dimples. Which isn’t actually too bad if you think about it because once I remove the filing scratches and polish up the lip, you probably wont be able to see the dimples as much because it should blend together nicely.

That about sums this process up! One thing to note, when all the file marks are pointed downward to the ground, you can barely tell the wheels were curbed. And If I didn’t have stretched tires, you probably couldn’t see the the file marks at all…But this isn’t a perfect world and what-if’s are a way of life. Time to stop questioning and making excuses and just clean up my mess for now!

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