Grinding white walls

I started out with a cut off disk on a grinder to take the large amount of white in the letters. Do not go past the raised letter or you will be tossing the tire in the garbage.


Then use a grinder with a sandpaper disk for removing rust and paint. you can roll over the black on the sidewall till it breaks through to the white edge. After you reach the outer edge of the white wall you can then start working your way around the sidewall taking off the black till you can see the white. This takes a long, LONG time!! If it is going really fast for you and a lot of white is showing up right away then you are doing it wrong. Use lighter grit sandpaper. You will end up taking too much off in one spot and you will not be able to tell till it's too late. Slow and easy.

when you get to the edge of the white ring that is close to the bead of the tire be carefull not to grind into the bead of the tire or you will have a sealing ploblem then. The inner edge comes pretty close to the bead edge.

next I took a die grinder with a worn out gasket remover pad and finished up the black that was left over on the whitewall and last I took a jitter bug sander to smooth it all out. It got dark on me but you can see a little bit of how they turned out. Before you do this to the tires you are going to run, do a few junk tires to get the hang of it.

I did these for the 34 after another club member went out and paid over $700.00 for radial wide whites for his car. I went to Pep Boys and picked these up. out the door they where $173.80 for all 4
Out came the grinders and with the money I saved I can put it some place else in the car. After the car gets done I may buy some bias WWW but for now these will do fine.

Cool low budget tech.

low budget and messy. I would not have believed it until I seen it. Steve comes up with some strange ideas sometimes.

HEY STEVE, YA THINK WHEN I GET MY RIMS FOR MY PARTY WAGON (NEW PROJECT)YA COULD GIVE ME A HAND IN DOIN MY TIRES? I WONDER IF YA CAN DO THEM TO BLACK WALLS?

I can help ya when you are ready for 'em. You can smooth out the lettering on the blackwalls but thin white walls or white letters will have the white ribbon inside the tire we are lookin' for with the WWW look..

AS SOON AS I FIND SOME RIMS THAT IM LOOKIN FOR, I'LL GET THE TIRES AND HOLLA AT YA...THANX

 

There is a tire shop up here that will do it for about 10 dollars a tire.

Do it yourself a lot cheaper than 40 bucks. I guess some people don't do their own stuff though.

What is your time worth,the way I look at it is if you have to buy all the stuff to do it and spend a hour a tire to do it and still there is a chance it could be messed up I think about 10 dollars a tire to someone who has a machine that will get it done right the first time is money well spent. 40 dollars above a set of common tires is still alot cheaper then buying specialty tires,lets say it takes me over 4 hours to grind the tires I could get alot done on more important stuff done to my car while the tires are off being ground and still be money ahead of buying of buying those expensive wide whites. My clumsy (BEEP) would have them all screwed up and end up just using them as black walls so there are times when its worth the money to pay to get it done,if I need to spend extra money on stuff like that I will try to work some overtime to pay for it.

Most people on this forum feel the same way. We work on our stuff. Tech tips we can do at home on our own time, on our own cars is a plus. My time is worth a lot but the feeling of a job well done by my own hands is more valueable to me than money. If you feel you would not be able to do it then by all means pay someone else to work on your car. For all other I would say try it on a junk tire to see what you think and then have some fun. You will be more proud while you cruise around with your self done wide white than having someone else do it.

Ive seen guys put their car up on jackstants and put it in gear. Then the tire rotates and you can hold the grinder stationary. Ill be trying this out a little later on in my project.

 

I did that to my Lincoln. But I did it with tire mounted on rim. Did it on rear of running car (in low gear). You can see the rubber on ground by rear tire.

thats a beautiful car!

They turned out good.