the fishing hat means leave me alone (part 2)

so about a month ago i got this shiny new set of wheels. they looked pretty, didn't they?

yeah, they did. well as nice as they were i wanted to get them powdercoated a darker color, kind of like these ones on this red r32:

so i brought them to a shop in union called procoatings, since they were the closest powdercoating shop i could find. i gave them the wheels and brought in some pictures of this red r32 and said i wanted to match that color. they gave me the giant color chart with a billion colors on it, all just a tad ligher and darker than the next, and told me to pick out a color. i eventually picked one out that i thought matched, but it was hard to tell from a little square on a book next to all the other colors, so they ordered 4 color samples from the supplier. this was early/mid february.

two weeks later, the samples finally came in and i had to pick one from those. i don't know how they picked the 4 colors as they were all pretty different from eachother. one was almost black, the other was lighter than the original wheel color and the other two were somewhere in between. i picked one out and they ordered the powder.

they sent the wheels out somewhere to get the original finish stripped off and eventually powdercoated them. it was getting on a month and a half by this time and i was calling every few days to find out what the hell was going on (i was originally given a 2 week timeframe for completion). i went to pick them up on tuesday and opened the box to see what they looked like...

the guy asked, "is that what you were expecting?" and with a disgusted look on my face, i replied, "uh, no! there's no shine to them!"

the first thing i thought of when i saw them was that they looked like they had just been sprayed with primer and no paint.

the guy found the original paint chip that i had picked out and told me "well, that's the color you picked out." you'd think that having done this for so many years they'd know which powders have a metallic finish and which don't. they could have helped me pick out a better color or at least confirmed with me once the powder came whether i did in fact want a COMPLETELY FLAT color on my wheels.

i just stood there looking at the wheel wondering what i was going to do. i asked the guy again why the color was so flat and he said they might be able to add a clear coat but it might not look good and might look "cloudy" in some places. he was busy doing some other coating jobs so i packed up the wheels into the car and left.

since i just paid $2400 for these wheels, $480 for the powdercoating, and had to wait a month and a half, i wasn't going to just "settle" for how they turned out. and since i have a track event next weekend and i need these wheels to mount tires to (so i'm not flying around a track on snow tires), i needed something done quickly. i don't want to pay to mount the tires to the wheels, run on them for a week, pay to have the tires dismounted, and get the wheels re-stripped and re-painted. i can't wait another month and a half and possibly have to pay again to have it all redone.

the next day i called them and told the guy i was still very unhappy with how they turned out and that the color was not what i wanted. i asked him if the lack of gloss was just the color i picked out or if they're all kind of like that and he said there's some colors that have a metallic finish. so again, why didn't they give me color options to choose from that weren't flat?

after some negotiating, i got the guy to agree to add a clear coat to them and do it before next thursday. if they still don't look good after that, they're going to have them re-stripped and re-coated. i don't know how much it will cost, though.

it never ends...