My Own Truck- 1999 Ford Ranger, Black

So, a little change of pace. I have been experiencing some trouble with the rims on the 1999 Ford Ranger that I purchased in January as my work truck. For the most part, the truck is in excellent condition.

However, the rims that came on the truck were quite feeble steel and have consequently rotted to the point where they began losing air through fissures in the metal itself. Having first replaced a tire back in February before discovering that the front driver's rim itself was failing, I was quite frustrated when I recently discovered that my rear passenger's side rim was losing air. So, I decided to start looking for completely new rims for the truck.

I found nothing on Craigslist, probably because I was looking very specifically for 16" Ford rims. However, I did find a set of brand new alloy rims on Ebay for $200 shipped, which would mean that I would need to then purchase tires, because the particular rims that come on the '99 Ranger are an odd and no-longer-used size, so my current tires would not work.

So, I was looking at a few weeks (minimum) of pumping up my tire with a bike pump in the mornings before work while I saved to buy what I needed to remedy the situation. However, by some stroke of incredible luck, I drove around the corner from my house and found a stack of four 16" ford rims with big beefy off road tires and rock rims. And that's not even the luckiest part of the situation. It turns out that the kid selling them only wanted $100 for them! Needless to say, I bought them, cash, flat out, and this is what I did with them this afternoon...

This is how they started.

I took a wire brush wheel on my drill and scoured the front and back of each rim.

The rim on the left is before I scoured the back, and the one on the right is after. You can see the rusty dust on the tire close to the rim. This removed any bubbles of rust on the surface of the wheel and prepared the entire surface to receive primer.

I then taped off the tire on the back and the rock rim and tire on the front. I only used 2" masking tape, and did a maximum of two rows around the tire. I am pretty comfortable with spray paint, but if you were doing this and are not so comfortable, you might want to wrap something (a sheet of paper or plastic) around the tire and tape it down on both sides. This way you won't slip up and prime or paint your tire too. Once the rims were taped, I primed them up.

Two quick coats of primer and a little time to dry, and I was ready to apply my finish paint. Being that my truck is black, and the rock rims and lug covers are chrome, I decided to make the rim black.

It was a damp day, and it actually started to rain as I was working, which lengthened the dry time for the paint. I wanted to get the whole job done today, so I applied multiple coats while the previous coats were still pretty tacky, but not wet, because then I would have been ricking runs. If I was not in a rush, I would have let each coat harden a bit more. I started scouring the wheels at noon, took a lunch break around 1 pm, and was loading the rims into the truck to go to the tire shop at 3:30 pm. I was home by about 4:45, and this is how the finish product came out...