Today I finally got the wheels home with tyres fitted.
Not that it all went to plan, that is…..I telephoned the tyre fitters this morning and they said they’d be done for 5pm today. This scuppered the planned lunchtime pick up, so I worked through and left half an hour early.
After fighting through the rush hour traffic I arrived at the garage to find my wheels exactly where I’d left them and my tyres still banded up in a pile, exactly where I’d left them too.
Returning again tomorrow was not an easy option so diplomatically I asked them to work past 5:30pm and fit the tyres & balance.
So arriving home this evening after 7pm in the miserable dark & rain I carefully placed the wheels in my No1 heated & dehumidified posh garage to spend the night.
As promised I’ve taken a few photo’s of the finished wheels.
Please excuse the tyres, they’re covered in that soapy stuff used to fit them still and soapy dirty fingerprints around the holes in the alloys from the fitters (and me) lifting the wheels around. I was going to wash them off but in the hammering rain and darkness outside I’ll leave it until the morning when I can see to do a better job.
As explained on Friday, I was quite taken aback on how they’ve come out after the clear anodising. With the test meter we measured consistently North of 20 microns so they are far, far better protected than they were new.
At first sight I thought they looked as if they hadn’t been refurbished at all, which was a little disappointing considering all the effort. Then the penny dropped….That’s because I have followed the original processes to a T, so they should look like this.
So to further talk myself into this theory and support the synopsis I started to google old factory pictures (or what I thought to be old). Kev’s post on page 40 of this thread helped too.
For some reason I’d gotten it in my mind that there was a stark contrast in light and dark between the polished and un polished surfaces (as in the photo of them in the back off my van leaving the polishers) but in reality it is all about how light hits the wheel, after all its all the same alloy, just a contrast between a smooth and textured surface.
Bingo! In some light and angles the wheels look all one shade and in others the texture strikes a contrast.
So after much ado (and waffle) here’s what all 5 wheels looked like tonight under the light of my No1 garage, seemingly one shade….
When laid flat and with the camera at an angle so the light hits the wheel in the horizontal you get the contrast.
So that’s hopefully (an OCD as best as you’ll get in 2015) refurbishment of the 914 Fuchs wheel……I tentatively throw down the gauntlet.
They came from Porsche and are the superceded version of securing nuts 
