The wheel deal.

These wheels, I have been looking at them, knowing restoring the wheels would be time consuming and tedious.
How right I was!
The factory GKN Kent wheels are pretty solid things and the coatings applied to them equally so.
The stock gunmetal metallic paint looks and behaves like powdercoating, which is impressive if it is, as this would surely be one of the first times powdercoating was used on factory, production line wheels. The stock clearcoat is pretty weak though and comes off with just a bit of a nasty look.....
I started off with these ugly things:

 They look really bad because the stock clearcoat yellows off after 37 years of exposure.
 Applied some stripper and waited:

Also found out something interesting about Kent wheels- they were x-rayed during manufacture, presumably to check for porosity or cracks in the castings:

Then I took them outside and water blasted off the lifted paint:

 That process took three goes to get 95% of the paint off, the rest was removed with scrapers and a wire wheel, then finished with a file on the damaged edges of the rims and then progressively finer abrasive papers until finished with a green scotchbrite pad.
Not sure if I want to go with a brushed look or polished as yet, but the back and insides of the rims have been finished in my favourite 2k epoxy etch primer and will be left in that finish.
This photo shows how yellowed the old clear is, you can see patches left that the stripper didn't remove:

 Wheels painted and polished. I kind of like the recesses on the face in the natural cast aluminium finish:

And of course, it wouldn't be an old car restoration without a problem. One of the rims had a ding on the edge, I have knocked out far worse before with no problems. And this one cracked. So I will either have this wheel welded (which should be a simple enough repair as it isn't major) or just buy another Kent: