Bought a car - need wheel refinishing advice

After a loong search, I finally found a good-condition E36 M3. Low-ish miles, two owners, bone stock. The car's in very good condition with the exception of one wheel - and from the looks of it, a light sand/respray won't solve the problem. It looks to me like the paint's literally chipping off. Any advice on fixing this? Do I need to use some sort of chemical stripper to completely remove the paint?

At some point, I will run a square rear wheel (17x8.5) setup on 245/255 tires. At that point, I could get the wheels professionally stripped and powdercoated. For now, it just looks odd having three nice ones and one peeling/nasty one.

I used aircraft paint stripper on a pair of old enkei 16in meshies. They had like 5-6 layers of paint. They looked 100x better just stripped lol.

It worked great, but I dismounted the tire. Man I miss working at a tire shop...

~Alex

What he said, or I've also sandblasted and repainted wheels like those and they came out great! What I want is pictures of the car.
WHERE ARE THE PICS OF THE CAR!!!

Pics coming! It's a 97 M3 Coupe w/ 99k miles. PPI showed basic maintenance - guibo, rtabs, various gaskets. Only downside is it's a lux, so I'm going to have to figure out how to rid the interior of the woodgrain.

Lux is cool, I kinda wish I had a lux instead of my sport version, just add the sport lip and its good to go!

I've had good luck blasting aluminum wheels with glass bead, paiting with self etching primer, then regular primer and finally color. But I'm not sure how you would match the paint with the other wheels.

Buy a onesie on craigslist or bimmerforums. Easier and possibly cheaper if you pay yourself minimum wage.

dont most bmw's have full size alloy spares? I know e30s have a 5th bottle cap in the back , and I think even the basket weaves had 5, not sure if an M3 would have 5 of the 17in rims tho....

~Alex

97 has different sizes. fronts are 7.5 rears 8.5

Yep - the spare is a 7.5. Might be worth just waiting and buying one of the many 17x9 options out there.

speedblind wrote: After a loong search, I finally found a good-condition E36 M3.

Am I the only one who read this and initally thought he meant the slang term for feces? I've read so many GRM posts that E36 M3, Bob Costas, and Berkeley no longer mean what they really mean, if you know what I mean.

Depending on where you are, there are places like This

canoe!?!

HAHA look at the URL name, China strikes again!

There's a write up of the www.fixrim.com service in the May issue that's going out this week. Short answer: For $109 a wheel, they make them nearly perfect.

I'll look into that - $100 bucks is well worth it.

Another question: can chrome be removed? There's a cheap set of chrome contours locally. But chrome us nasty.

Chrome can be removed by reverse electroplating. Look around for a plating shop, ask them.