Plasti-dip advice
 

I'm planning on plasti-dipping my wheels in the near future and was just looking for some tips or advice from people who have done it. What do you wish you would have known before you did yours? Any help is appreciated Thanks.

Hi bigjon30. I plasti-dipped my stock wheels on my 02 monte black about 1 year ago. Its a very simple process.

When I dipped mine, I used rattle cans that you can get at stores like Lowe's, Walmart, even Advance and Autozone now because of its popularity in the automotive application. To answer your question about what I(we) wished I would have known before doing it, I wish that I would have played around with the rattle cans a little more before applying it. Because of the inconsistent spray(even when using other caps), I found that the initial texture was fairly porous and worsened with each layer.

The wheels looked great and cleaned up fairly easily.... until winter. That's when the porous finish really hurt. Salt got stuck in the pores and stained and faded the dip, and wouldn't clean up regardless of what I used. After my first winter with them dipped, I had to peel it all back and respray them in the spring. Based on the cost($25 about - 4 cans), I am more than willing to continue spraying them after major season changes because it is far cheaper than a new set of wheels, but it may be a hassle for some. Since the last time I sprayed them, I have experimented quite a bit with using pints/gallons of plasti-dip through an actual gun and it turned out great so I would recommend going that route if you can. I'm assuming that using a spray gun and eliminating the pores will definitely help with the winter salt issue.

Hope this helps!

How many coats did you use?

I HIGHLY recommend using an entire can for each rim. When I dipped mine, I only put enough on to cover the rim and then a few additional coats where I could still see rim. It lasted great, had it on for 3 years and still looked good. However, when it came to stripping it, the lack of coats made it impossible to simply peel off. It would come it very tiny strips...and I mean VERY tiny. Ended up having to take a power washer to each rim with some heat to finally get it to come off.

Also, if you have the diamond cut rims, make sure the center caps are especially clean and apply it thoroughly. On mine, I must've gotten salt or moisture between the plastidip and the centercaps which caused the center caps to pit out, like something had been eating away at it. I had a bunch of fluffy white pores in the center cap.