Welcome to RAW Works. My name is Raymond and I live in the western suburbs of Sydney. This blog will be a portal for me to photo-document the wheels I refurbish and repaint. This is only a side hobby for me so there won't be any crazy custom jobs! My skills have only stretched so far as to using body repair materials, resprays and polishing, so anything that requires welding and unbuckling will be beyond what I can do. I hope to improve on my current skills as I go along, and as a lover of wheels, it's a way for me to express my art side as well as giving life to some tired wheels again.

At the moment, I'm just scouring through eBay for damaged wheels selling for cheap. If you have any wheels you don't need anymore, throw me an email/comment. At the moment I'm just buying sets of wheels to refurb then sell them off. I prefer not to do personal jobs/requests as I don't trust myself with that yet! But that said, pass me an email/comment if you need any help wheel-wise.

My Facebook page is @ http://www.facebook.com/raysalloywheelworks/, please "like" it!

Cheers.

Oct 9, 2012

Project Kouki, part 2 - assembly

The past two weeks were dedicated to organising the House of Stance meet with Nikita Esco and rebuilding these wheels.  The lips arrived on time and Kennedy (new owner of these wheels) was keen to get them done for the HoS meet so we got a move on.



Before I go on, I should mention that the donor centres were RS264 (17x7 ET45) and RS265 (17x8 ET50).


When I first saw the specs, I found it odd that the offsets didn't quite match up; the lips were the same (0.5") and they were sandwich-mounted, which meant the barrels made up for the 1" difference.  That said, the offsets should've differed by exactly 12.7mm, but as you can see with the original specs, that wasn't the case.  So I inspected the centres more closely.


As you can see in the above photo of the centres on even ground, the centres differ in design; the left is more flat-faced (like the RS262 and RS263 in Project FD) whereas the right is more convex.  We test fitted the centres and the brake clearance is identical; only difference is, the convex face will have a higher offset if the same width barrels and lips were used on both models.  As such, we decided to use them for the fronts to provide a more staggered-look. 

Back to the build; first on the agenda was to have Kennedy get the wheels powdercoated up.  We had a few dramas with the powdercoater which ended with a no-charge set of mediocre-finished white centres.  Hard to notice and easy to touch-up, and we were on a deadline, so we moved on.

Kennedy came over and provided much needed help with the cleaning and prepping the barrels and lips for the rebuild.  Numb fingers by the end of it all.





A way to determine if the barrels are standard BBS or not is to see if they have a serial number stamped on the mounting surface.  The barrel with the welded perimeter didn't have this number.



House of Stance OGs dropped by to check out the wheels.  Worked to the wee hours of the night, but we got it done.  I ended up finishing them off inside the house whilst enjoying a beer, with the Avengers on.








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1 comment:

Sooty said...

Love it dude! The Prima Donna colour combo never gets old on RS's! Keep it up