Cromodora wheels refurb.

As I needed to fit new tyres on the front, I thought I may as well have all 5 wheels refurbished at the same time.
I took them to a first rate wheel refurbishers in Guildford who had previously done a fine Job on a set of Momo wheel on my Coupe.

I had a phone call the next day asking me to call in and see a problem. So I did.
Once the old paint had been stripped off the wheels were pitted with corrosion all over so it wasn't to be a quick job to fix.
Basically with the old wheel's high magnesium content in the alloy once corrosion starts it carries on under any paint.
Unfortunately I didn't think to take a photo of the wheels in this state.
The cure is to degas the wheels by keeping them in a warm oven for a couple of weeks to evaporate all traces of gas in the wheel, otherwise it will simply blow any subsequent paintwork quickly. They then gave the wheels 2 coats of powder coating so the appearance was acceptable.

Another issue which came to light was that these standard wheels are unsuited to modern tubeless valves: there is no mechanical lock in 40 year old alloys and the valves are held in purely by air pressure inside the tyre. I had been lucky and not had a problem.
The safe thing to do is to fit tubes, which I had done.

The finished results look good and made me realise just how scruffy the olf finish really was.

Hi Pete
Found your post via a web search. Have got my Cromodora wheels from '82 1500 due for refurbishment and the same corrosion/pitting issue has arisen. If you're happy to share, could you let me know roughly what you paid for them to be refurbished?
Cheers,
Scott

Hello Scott,

it's not a problem sharing info like this. I used www.primoalloys.co.uk/about-us/ Primo Alloys to do mine. At the time they were based in Guildford, but have since moved to Woking.
Mine were a bit of a learning curve for them and I ended up paying £300 for the set of 5 to be done. They did say that now they really knew what was involved with X1/9 Cromadora magnesium wheels they expected that future cost would be around £100 a wheel. That was 2.5 years ago and a change of location so best to call them for up to date info.
I don't know how local they are to you, but I would wonder if any one else offering a cheaper price than that truly understands what is involved.
My wheels are still immaculate after all this time.

I hope this helps.