Ive been polishing my Fat Fives and now the center caps are really bothering me. The difference between the new surface of the rims and the 14+(?) year old center cap is very significant. I also dont want my Civic to say Acura . So I hit the red button on the upper right and found out that the 99-00 Si caps fit. Have not been able to find a set of them so I went to the local Honda Dealer so see if I could order a set. Turns out that they are a special order item thats going to cost me $130!!! So should I sand the Acura stuff off the caps and paint a Honda logo on or put a vinyl sticker on it or something? Or are these caps still worth something to someone and should try to trade/sell them for a set of Si caps?

 

Just sand them down smooth and you could use 'chrome' spray paint to make it look somewhat close to the polished face of the wheels.

 

I was thinking about polishing the caps the same way I did with the rims if it came to it then putting a Honda logo on them. The metal is very thin on the caps but its not like the sanding will take that much off of them. So you think its worth "destroying" them?

 

I don't think that you could get the same results on the caps as you did with the wheels.

If you try to polish the caps, you'll just sand it down to the bare plastic.

Just sand them down enough to the point where you can't feel the roughness that was caused by the 'oxidation' and just use the 'chrome' spay paint to at least getting it looking like the surrounding polished area of the wheels.

 

I doubt that the sanding will blast through the metal. The 'oxidation' is more like the clear coat scratching off. Very different from what happened to the rims.

 

You can get new ones for less than that. The center cap for '99 Civic Si wheels is part number 44732-S50-N91, according to the San Leandro Honda parts website. They sell them for $18.98 each. And Majestic Honda sells them for $16.40 each.

 

Fug it, rock em with no center caps.

or look on craigslist for center caps i see a lot there.

 

Ugh... no caps? No way. I put too much time and effort cleaning these rims up to leave the job unfinished. About CL, Ive been looking but cant seem to find them. Maybe its easy to find where you live but that does not seem to be the case in So Cal.

 

Can anyone confirm that 44732-S50-N91 is part #21 in the pic?

 

can i get some details on how you polished them up? planning on doing mine

 

I sanded the acura off on mine. just be careful not to sand too far

 

Depending on how bad your rims are to start you might need a lower grit. My rims had pretty bad oxidatation on the clear so it had to go. There was slight curbing on them too. Anyways I just sanded with 240 grit to get through the clear and fix up the curbing and sanding away the lines from the machining then I followed up with 300 grit, 400 grit, 500 grit, 600 grit and 1000 grit. I taped the wheel up here to paint between the spokes. Just a small detail but it changes the look a lot in my book. Went from this

to this.


Then I started wet sanding with 1200 grit, 1500 grit and finished sanding with 2000 grit. I then used a buffer to polish with Mother's Wheel polish and then buffed it again with Blue Magic Wheel Polish. Then I waxed it with Meguiars Gold Class wax and buffed again. Very time consuming (took me over 7 hours a wheel) but the results are good. I still have to finish up one more, might try some aircraft remover to get the clear out of the way. That is the hardest and most time consuming part of the job.

 

That's correct, according to the Majestic Honda website.

 

Ok. Thanks. Now I gotta decide if I want to buy new caps or refinish the old ones...

 

ill be working for a few weeks then. thanks a lot for the write up gonna try it for sure

 

Ha ha. How did my question turn into a write up? Well not really a write up, not detailed enough. Got the ideas from another forum, google it. Still, I hpoe that it helps people do it if they want. If I had time it would have taken me about 4 days or so. I dont so it took a lot longer.

 

Did you just sand off or refinish? They are blank now or did you put a logo on someway?

 

One more to go!