correct wheel paint color

[POCOFIAT]

I am restoring my '79 2000...it has the original 13 inch painted "petal" design rims---most people think they are silver and "black" but if you look carefully you see the black is realy a sort of dark gunmetal grey. A couple of years ago someone posted a DIY guide to painting rims and had the correct paint codes from modern spray cans available in the US. Can anyone shed some light on the correct colors? been working on this girl for years adn seems a shame to cheap out with just any old grey paint.....Ideas welcome!

[ROOK1]

I have never heard of the "petal" design, but I am still considered a novice at this Fiat thing. I do remember coming across an article on restoring wheels that sounds similiar to what you are talking about. Here it is. http://www.kendickson.com/car/frwheels/frwheels.html

[POCOFIAT]

I have never heard of the "petal" design, but I am still considered a novice at this Fiat thing. I do remember coming across an article on restoring wheels that sounds similiar to what you are talking about. Here it is. http://www.kendickson.com/car/frwheels/frwheels.html

Thanks ......I am sure these is a better name for the style--that is what my Italian mechanic guy call them. I settled for a cool flat gunmetal grey adn silver...ought to work. Good luck with your ride....

[ventura ace]

I've heard them called Daisey's, Roosevelt Daisey's, and many other names. There are a few very similar designs, so similar that it takes a trained eye to distinguish the differences. Ken Dickson's article, mentioned earlier in this thread, is a good source of information. I have a set on my spider, that are actually two different kinds. Three have Fiat Roosevelt A.R.E. cast into the back side rim, and one has American Racing Equipment cast into the back side rim. The 'petals', the hub, and inner rim were painted a medium charcoal grey color when I bought them, and I left them that color. You can click on these thumbnails to get a view of mine:



I tried to find a matching color to touch up some dings and also to paint another replacement wheel that I bought to replace one that I ruined by driving too agressively one morning (smacked a curb pretty hard). I have leftover paint from 3 cans, all by Plasti-kote. One is spray paint 'Rebuilder's Cast Finish 285 cast gray', another is spray paint 'Car color CC 9087', that I found to be too dark. The last is liquid touch up 'Toyota 3237', which was a tad too light. Though I like the color of mine, I prefer a lighter color, as established by Ken Dickson, by bead blasting the aluminum to get the natural color. One of these days, I may redo mine to a lighter color.

I've also seen the petals painted to match the body color of the car, and it looked quite nice. One I recall was a British Green color.

In any event, all of them that I've seen have had the outer rim polished smooth (natural aluminum). Good luck with restoring your wheels. They are a nice classic 'period-correct' wheel for the car.

[So Cal Mark]

the petal wheels are steel wheels, painted two-tone with small black plastic hubcaps

[perthling]

Slightly off topic, but there was another post somewhere regarding the colour of the early 13" steel wheels (white or silver). I had no luck sourcing the original paint code for the white, but had my wheels powdercoated in 'pearl white' which is a slightly creamy white colour which looks pretty close to the original white which I have seen only in photos.

[racydave]

Dupli color makes a mag wheel paint that mirrors what Alvon has on his Roosevelts.

[ventura ace]

Pocofiat,
I guess I am confused whether you have Roosevelt wheels or another wheel as described by Mark. Do you have any pictures? I believe that the Roosevelts were more like a late 60's, early 70's thing, so it would be unusual if your car does have Roosevelts.

In any event, I took another couple of pictures today of a spare Roosevelt wheel that is 'brand new', in that it has never been mounted with a tire. The 'petal' spokes were a very bright aluminum color before I hit them with some aluminum polish today, that ended up turning them a grey color. They are not painted, just cleaned with aluminum polish. The under side of the spokes shows what the color looked like before I used the aluminum polish. If I were to have the spokes bead blasted to remove the effect of the aluminum polish, the outer part of the spokes would again look like the under side.

[Nick]

Unless you're not talking about those types of wheels. My original rims looked like this, i considered them to look similar to petals: