Ok I'm going to just come out with it. I'm not a huge fan of alloy wheels, especially 20 year old ones which are a pig to keep clean and in good condition. Add in a couple of previous owners who weren't hugely keen on keeping all the original bits of the car intact (see centre caps of alloys, luggage blind, mirror flaps on sun visors etc etc) and it ends up letting the side down a bit. They're also a sod to refurb without paying someone £40 a wheel to sandblast and then powder coat them, and then another firm £20 a wheel to remove the tyres, then refit them once done at the powder coaters and be wheel-less for a week and its all a bit of a chore. I like steel wheels with hubcaps which are honest things and a lot easier to look after in my experience. The Mercedes has alloy wheels....
To begin. This is one of the best wheels
They're not in bad condition, hold air fine and have locking nuts, they are shod with some 6 month old tyres but the brake dust gathers in the recesses and is a general chore to keep on top of. I wanted steelies, which Mercedes sold as part of a 'winter kit' for the w203 I'm given to understand. Tracking 4 down, 20 years later was a bit of a challenge, but eventually I found a breakers in Crawley who had a matching set of 4x 6j x 15" ET31 steel wheels, which is what I wanted. I drove up in the pouring rain a few weeks ago to collect them and brought them back to HQ. They were a bit old and corroded but weren't past it by any stretch of the imagination. I paid £15 each for them which is a bit more than I wanted to pay, but they weren't interested in a deal for all 4, and the alternative was to buy 4 different ones from hither and yon and pay a fortune in postage. These were reasonably local and only needed one trip out to collect.
The wheels had quite a bit of surface rust
A mixture of crusty steel and built up brake dust. The outside face was better, but not a lot better. I set to with a wire wheel in my angry grinder to take off the worst of the flaky bits and lumps from all 4 wheels which generated quite a substantial bit of dust. A person with a double-digit IQ would have worn a mask, I held my breath as much as I could and ended up with brown bogeys for about 3 days...
The end result looked better. I also gave the lips a really good seeing to with a metal file to remove all the surface rust and old rubber to make sure when they got to receive new tyres the beads sealed properly, as otherwise the tyre place would need to file the nice new paint off to smooth off the lip which wouldn't be good
They got 2 coats of Vactan at this point covering both the inner and outer faces of the wheels and hopefully addressing the remaining surface rust. Next up was a seeing to with black enamel paint. Once the Vactan had thoroughly dried, I broke out these.
I got 3x 400ml cans of this from ebay for £12 posted, which I hoped would be plenty. I painted the wheels one face at a time, with about an hour between coats until all 4 wheels had received 4 coats inside and out, before being left to dry out thoroughly for 24 hours.
Looking loads better, I hope you agree? Again, my 'hold your breath and spray 'til you go blue' method of PPE failed hard and I had black bogeys for 3 days. At this point I trial fitted one of the wheels to the car to make sure it didn't foul anything, the bolt holes lined up etc etc. Mercifully they were fine. One thing that was very obvious though was that the bolts that go with the alloy wheels are WAY too long for the steels. The alloy wheel bolts are 40mm thread, whereas the steels need stubby 20mm bolts to hold them onto the hubs. I had one set of 5 of these with my spare wheel in the boot so fitted it up ok
I went to ebay and ordered a set of 20 bolts which the seller assured me would definitely fit the car. They were 25mm thread m12x1.5mm pitch with a 17mm head. I hate locking nuts with a passion because in 2019 no-one steals shit alloys off 20 year old Mercedes, and ham-fisted morons do shear off locking wheelnut keys trying to remove and refit wheels. They turned up and looked like this
Lovely shiny new bolt on the right. However...
On refitting the wheel, the bolt hit the end of the blind threaded hole in the hub well before the steel wheel was clamped in place. Bother. Here you can see the issue. Alloy wheel bolt on the left, brand new 25mm bolt in the middle and 20mm bolt on the right.
The new nuts also have a tapered rather than domed section between the head and the threaded section which also doesn't help. OK, back to ebay, I needed 15 of the stubby 'spare wheel' wheel bolts to proceed any further. I can get away with just having 15, as I can reuse the 5 that go with the spare wheel in the boot since if I get a flat tyre, I can use the same bolts I take out to refit the spare wheel now. I also don't want any locking nuts at all.
A chap in Southampton came up trumps, for whatever reason he had 5 sets of 5 stubby 20mm bolts for sale, and took an offer on three sets which were duly posted out to me. I cleaned them up in the vice with a wire brush and gave the threads a light dab of copper grease and put them on the shelf.
Next step was to get some rubber. I went with my favourite Uniroyal Rainsports from Tyreleader.co.uk at £40 each delivered. They arrived from Germany within 72 hours, the parcel of wheelnuts from Southampton - 10 miles away - took 6 days to get here....
I took the wheels and tyres to my local tyre place who are really decent, I dropped the wheels and tyres off to them and went shopping with the kids while they fitted the tyres to the wheels. I've been going to them for a good few years now and they were pleased as punch that I left them alone to just get on with it, and that I didn't have 4 manky old bald tyres that they needed to dispose of either. They fitted the tyres, new valves and caps and balanced them for £40 which I was more than happy to pay. I love the smell of brand new tyres.
The final piece of the puzzle was some hubcaps. I wanted genuine Mercedes hubcaps, aftermarket ones are universally terrible quality and worse looking in my opinion, but originals are now 20 years old and seemed to be rather scuffed, or outright chewed up! Ebay came up trumps again with a set of 4 hubcaps which were scuffed but otherwise in good condition for £20 delivered. They arrived safe and sound a few days later and I set to with fixing them up. I used my 'mouse' sander with some 600 grit sandpaper, followed by 1200 grit to sand down the rims of the hubcaps to get the gouges out and smooth them down
I masked off the centres as they were in good condition and I couldn't work out how to separate the chromed metal star insert from the plastic
Wiped them off with an old rag covered with meths to get as much dust off as I could and then began giving them a few coats of wheel silver
I got 4x 400ml cans of this stuff from ebay for £10 which I thought would be plenty, giving each hubcap 4 coats of this basically used all of it up. In hindsight 6 cans may have been better but the hubcaps have come out well enough. One of them had particularly deep gouges which haven't come out quite as well as I'd hoped, but its not obvious from more than a couple of feet away. After this I had silver bogeys for 36 hours.
I let them dry for 24 hours before starting on the lacquer to seal the paint. I managed to do one coat on one hubcap before my lacquer ran out and I had to order some more from Halfords
It took them 4 days to get the lacquer in stock but once there I got on and gave the hubcaps 3 coats each with a few hours in between to dry off
The colour match vs the original (centre section) paint is mercifully very good. As you can see from the rightmost hubcap its blended in really well.
Next up, demo fitting a hubcap to a wheel
I'm pretty pleased with that, from 18" away they look really good (IMHO). So only one task remains. Car with alloys fitted at 18:30 tonight
30 minutes later, with SGS jack deployed to lift each corner in turn and swap the alloys over to the steelies using stubby bolts and fitting hubcaps on turns it into full on taxi-spec c-class
I think its a much cleaner look, will be easier to keep clean as the hubcaps are very flat with no intricate bits for brake dust to get stuck in, and if it gets to it, they can be removed, sanded and re-painted quickly and easily if the brake dust and road muck gets really embedded.
I need to take the car out for a few runs to wear the tyres in, and also then re-check the wheelnuts but I'm really pleased with how it looks now. All that remains is to do something about the lacquer peel! My lungs are probably fucked from the amount of rust, enamel paint, silver paint and lacquer I breathed in - I really need to get a decent mask for this sort of thing. But the end result is most pleasing.
