Reclaiming A Stock Steering Wheel - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!

Here’s the wheel after the initial epoxy work was completed. Now it’s time to bodywork it to perfection.

Glazing and spot putty works great for filling small pin holes and little imperfections…

…which, as seen by the numerous orange sections on the steering wheel, there were a few. Once the putty was sanded smooth, it was time for the first coat of high-build primer.

After the initial coat of primer, there were still a few pinholes and imperfections to be found throughout the wheel that needed to be sorted out.

For this end, I’ll be using a combination of spot putty as well as Bondo professional gold body filler.

The spot putty is super easy to sand, so I applied it pretty liberally to any imperfection I could find. The center spokes looked a little wavy, so I skimmed them in filler as well before block sanding the entire length to get them nice and straight.

I’ve got a variety of different sanding blocks that always come in handy for these types of projects.

I hit the entire wheel with 120-grit before it was ready for another coat of high-build primer.

The sandpaper graveyard gives you an idea how much sanding is involved to get to this point.

Sanded down and almost perfect, our reduced wheel is now ready for another coat of high-build primer.

To coat the wheel, I initially used Eastwood’s self-etching primer, though I found that I really needed more of a high-build type primer. Luckily, I had some of their Epoxy 1:1 primer left over from a previous project. Also pictured here are their Huggin’ Orange basecoat and 2.1 VOC Urethane clearcoat, both of which use the same urethane activator.

I shot all three different coatings (primer, base, and clear) using Eastwood’s Concours HVLP detail gun. With a 1.0 needle standard, it worked great and made it easy to go from one coating to the next without changing guns.

The first primer application consisted of three to four coats applied in 10-15 minute intervals. Once it flashed dry, I wet sanded it using 400-grit sandpaper thoroughly before applying a second series of primer coats. I wet sanded the entire wheel again before it was smooth as glass and ready for color. Applying multiple coats between sanding sessions ensures that there is plenty of primer built up on the surface, keeping “burn through” to a minimum when it came to sanding things smooth.

Now it’s time to spray some color! A light to medium coat went down first with a 10-15 minute flash interval before I applied multiple wet coats of the urethane base. A similar process was used to apply the clear, allowing each coat to flash before applying the next. This reduces sagging and runs by allowing the paint to flash or dry a little bit before another wet coat is applied.

And there you have it! Stock styling in a more compact package. We’ll cover the column install next month as well as the power steering conversion.