I've been considering getting the Watanabe F8 wheels on my car refurbished for quite a long time (along with other jobs). Question; according to the Watanabe website, these are Magnesium Alloy wheels, most after market wheels are aluminium alloy. Does this have any bearing on repairing any minor curb damage? Also, I've heard that one should never oven bake paint onto an alloywheel, esp. powder coating. (1/00)
Magnesium has to be handled with care I seem to remember reading .. all those stories of WW2 bombers that had wheels of fire when they landed (used to overheat and suddenly you have a couple of Catherine wheels under your plane...all adds to the fun). I had Panasports refurbished with powder coating and stoved on ... I found lots of porosity as they used a sandblaster to strip the paint and this went for the weak surface of the porosity bubbles. But it is oven baked .. but Magnesium may not like that... So I would recommend you ask ..and then inspect their work before you trust them. (1/00)
I had my wheels bead-blasted and then painted. They look great and I'm assured they can do this over and over. If you powder coat then I'm told you only really get one, maybe two, goes. (1/00)
Why? (1/00)
I was told the heat of the powder coating method can damage the wheels. But I don't know whether this is true/false/whatever. (1/00)

I had an interesting conversation last night with someone with experience of getting various wheels restored over the years:
1. Many so-called wheel restorers treat steel and alloy wheels the same, so be careful in doing your homework.
2. Some are a bit amateurish putting the tyres back on the rim, and scratching up the new finish.
3. Blasting; sand no good, some advertise "bead blasting", but plastic beads is preferred for alloys. Many use steel bead which is fine for steel. Some will also use copper slag, which again isn't much use.
4. Oven bake (powder coat); he thought it wasn't a good idea in the first place. There's too much risk in wheel distortion, so maybe you're riding your luck getting wheels powder coated more than once (though why anyone would need to get a wheel powdercoated twice is a mystery).
5. Ideally you should just lacquer a wheel, not paint it, or only use light paints. Harder to see cracks appearing apparently.

I guess its best to go back to the original advice, and see evidence of that companies previous work. (1/00)