2006 Avanti Chrome Wheel Appearance Improvement

[ronmanfredi]

Our 2006 Avanti came with 17” wheels that were actually for the 2004 Mustang Mach 1 models. They have a lot of miles on them and since I recently put new tires on them, I decided to dress them up a little instead of replacing them.  The chrome is getting tired and really looked bad on the inside of the wheel, so I decided to black out the part that you see the most when looking through the rim.  The newest trend in wheels is to wrap them for unique patterns/colors, and since I had some extra black carbon fiber wrap, I decided to use that.  The other thing was to figure out how much of the inside actually needed blacking out, and I determined that 3” from the back side of the spokes would be sufficient.  Also, the diameter of the wheel spoke edge is different than 3” towards the back side of the rim, so wrapping it in 1 piece would end up being more difficult due to the extra curvature.  I did a test wrap of about 1/4 of the wheel, 3” deep and it did exactly what I thought it was going to, no good.  As I looked at it, I realized that installing or removing wheel weights would also become a problem, so the solution would be to wrap the inside in pieces, with each “joint” being behind the “spokes”. That would solve both problems and if wheel weights were added or removed, I could patch that area much easier.  I also used 3M adhesive promoter (primer) to increase the wrap glue strength.  A small brush was used to apply it to the area that the wrap pieces were would be placed.  So, here we go: