Finally wrapping up the restoration on a set of wheels I'd bought off a good mate years ago; the 99% completed wheels actually making an appearance here to model some Volk Racing 84C covers way back in late 2014, then again on a blogpost covering their less-mesh-more-fin EX-C sibling in early 2015. Amazingly it wasn't until just last weekend they were reunited with their completed original 'short' chrome caps, lined up for a photo and finally checked off as 'done' in my mind. Good.
Jumping back a second to kick this off with the classic wheel-post stats-first format:
SSR EX-C Mesh
14 x 6.5", +20.
4x100
June 1988 (December 1987 casting)
Standard EX-C 'Reverse' mounting with early full-flange barrels.
Photo-set from August 2013; thoroughly cleaned, but exactly as they pulled up at 25 years old. Minor wear an tear aside, remarkably well..
Chipped and marked faces and plates, yet the chrome on the caps? Near perfect - gotta' love chrome! Sadly all four caps had the same lifting under the acrylic 'coin'...
The original valves and caps...
The plates annoyingly-specific to the 14" EX-C Mesh face. The small-pattern locking collars and matching 'short' caps however are all fortunately standard SSR fare...
Speed Star EX-C...
...and a December 1987 casting date. More randomly, it's interesting how well the yellow zinc plating on the back of the caps has survived.
Also interesting: the flanges marked with both the PCD and offset, despite this information being marked on the standard sticker only inches away...
...which thankfully Speed Star also printed on-and-with good materials; they typically survive well, and these are no exception.
Anyway, since this set is still so tidy and original, I really wanted to do my best to freshen them up as sympathetically as possible. Not just keeping the faces with their original barrels, but the same caps, valves, fasteners and so on - as much as possible...
The faces were knocked out and given a light coat of silver...
The 1465 barrels (..somewhere in this lot..) went along to the polishers to get the anodizing stripped off just the lips, then polished...
All 160 original pieces of hardware were sent off for a new coat of tool black and silver zinc.
Faces pressed back into their barrels...
Plates painted black, letters sanded down, cleared.
No. Nope. Too glossy...
Plates sanded, painted satin black, letters sanded down again, very carefully polished. Yep, that'll do!
With the chrome on the cap bodies and locks still so good, they needed little more than a strip, clean, lube and polish to wind back the decades..
...but those acrylic cap coin decals were toast, so reproduction domed decals it is. These look great.
I'm not kidding here either: sticking these on was the tidied caps was "the last 1%". Ahh, ten-minute jobs; the "I'll just do that later"; not unlike the backwards fuel gauge wiring I've been meaning to reverse on the GTS for the best part of a decade..!
Anyway, not this time! With the caps done, we're done. That's it for these.
The plan had always been to get them on the AW11 - they're period perfect and were quite possibly ordered when new this exact application - but bloody hell have I spoilt myself with other wheels. In 2015 I restored the set of Rays Engineering SuperVolks that are still on the car today, and have long worked a handful of other wheels in-front of the poor old 14" EX-C's on the path to the AW11 throne. One day though... their time'll come...
