The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area General Truck Talk painting tires

Hi guys
Does anybody have painted tires with any white vinyl paint, simulating the white wide tires like the atlas brand?
thanks

I have NOT painted any white walls on but I do remember reading an article about doing it in the Old Cars Weekly paper some time ago.

At that I time I think there was still a couple places you could get the real stuff. Hopefully someone here can help or maybe someone at Old Cars can "hook you up" if you send a letter to the editor.

Unless there has been dramatic improvements in that paint, don't waste your time. It's not durable enough to make it worth your while.

Back in the old days,I couldnt afford the real whitewall tires. I would buy a can of whitewall tire paint from the Western Auto store and paint them up.They actually looked pretty good,course I was 16 yrs. old at the time.I dont know if Western Auto still carries that paint or not. The local Western auto store here has been gone for 50 yrs.

Check out this thread on the "HAMB". Step by step do it yourself :-)

http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=8249&highlight=painting+whitewall

Yup, looks like they've improved the paint. Let us know when you do the car wash test

Do they still sell the fake rubber whitewalls?

Port-a-walls:

http://kustoms.com.au/osc/index.php?cPath=234&osCsid=566214170c0068a505cc9e55bf286f5d

http://www.hotrodders.com/forum/port-walls-32606.html

Here is a video of a guy making "wide whites" out of raised white letter tires.

http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=124144

Thanks guys, why not !
let´s try, is funny

Try that at your own risk. The reason that the black part overlays the white is to keep the tire together. The way that he ground those down, the tire is sure to fail when the sidewall comes apart. I've actually seen that happen on a tire that had been curbed enough to expose the white layer.

Fake whitewalls aka Port-A-walls, toilet seats, falsies, etc. Now available again at Lucas Tire in the California (Long Beach?) branch only.

Dale your expierences mirror mine long ago. We used to repaint them often before a big date. Did a lot of my shopping back then at W. Auto

Hey Gazim,Yeah ,back in the good old days,we had to make do with whatever we could find,and the old Western Auto stores had a lot of car accesories,at reasonable prices.Things like fender skirts, Mud flaps ,headlight bonnets,glasspack mufflers,you name it and they had it.Oh yeah,and I cant forget a good selection of hood ornaments.

Longbox 55,

I beg to differ. The very thin black rubber that covers the white lettering is not a structural part of the tire.

The failure you are talking about is a result of structural damage to the side wall due to an impact or multiple impacts... being "curbed" as you stated.

There are people that actually machine down the sidewall instead of grinding it as the guy did in the video. This had been done on thousands of tires with successful results.

I have to disagree. I work in the tire industry. The failures I'm talking about are not from sidewall impact, but from scrubbing the curb, which is virtually identical to grinding on the sidewall. The white inner layer actually will peel off the inner black layer. As stated, there's a reason that they overlay the white layer with the black. Messing with sidewall integrity is not something to take lightly. Especially when you keep in mind just how thin the sidewall is on a modern tire, especially passnenger car tires. You have maybe 1/4" of rubber on a quality tire, less on cheap ones.
With all of the recent issue with tire safety, would you really want to risk it?

The material that is being removed in the case at hand is cosmetic, not structural. It is the black rubber covering the white rubber that creates the white wall / raised white letters.

As an Engineer I know that a 3000# vehicle hitting or scrubbing into a curb is much more traumatic to the structural integrity of the tire sidewall than grinding a very small amount of the cosmetic black rubber that is covering the whitewall.

That being said I am not endorsing the grinding or machining method. It was merely posted as something that has been done for decades with successful results.

John

Diamond Back Radial Tires they rework modern radials and apply white wall to them. Red,white,blue and gold lines for collector cars trucks and hot rods. http://www.dbtires.com/