Powder coating wheels

Gun metal grey.....

To black...


Will post pics of the bad boy when I get them back from the shop after they put the tyres on..

Time to fess up: I fookered the wheel trying to get the bushes out. Too much heat.

Using my homemade puller, I increased the heat in steps:

heat gun > negative

propane torch > nada

MAPP gas torch > zip

I then drilled a bunch of little holes in the rubber, then used a saber saw to cut through the remaining rubber to leave only the steel outer sleeve. I then went through the same sequence of heat sources, but this time I could use a pilot bearing puller on a slide hammer since the rubber was gone.

No joy.

Got pissed off and picked up the acetylene torch. Heated it up till the paint started to turn black. The sleeve I was working on still wouldn't budge; the jaws of the puller just tore/folded the steel sleeve and came loose. Repeatedly.

Got extremely pissed off.

I cut the steel sleeve out with the torch, no problem. I've done it many times before, cutting corrosion-seized bearing races out of various steel rollers & such.

Where I screwed up was in not letting the wheel cool off before starting on the second one. I ended up distorting the bushing bore. The wheel is certainly annealed or at least weakened in that spot. I don't trust it anymore.

This is my first expensive bike-related mechanical screw-up. Kinda ruined my day. A good example of my occasional tendency to be penny-wise and pound-foolish. I'm not sure how else one would go about removing them, short of having a machinist bore them out. I makes me wonder what kind of torture the powder coaters and such are putting the wheels through to remove them.

The silver lining: My wonderful wife says, "No sense beating yourself up about it. Just go ahead and order a set of new wheels."

dunno if it was just me but I all I saw when I read that was "Dymags"