My car came from the factory with 14″ wheels. Over the years, one of its previous owners had fitted it with 16″ re-bored Etoile 455 3-piece wheels. The Etoiles performed well but never suited the car in my opinion. Painting them gold helped but then the gold finish degraded and they looked worse than ever. With OEM 16″ wheels getting very hard to find, I ordered the Superformance replicas in silver. I know the Superformance rears are not 100% correct compared with the factory 16″ wheels, but they look good, are well made and suit the Ferrari a whole lot more than the Etoiles – a design that was popular with 80s Porsche tuners.
The problem with the Superformance wheels are the center caps. They are terrible and went straight in the garbage when I saw them. Being copies of the factory wheels, the original 50-year old factory center caps also fit the Superformance wheels. All I needed was four good original center caps. And there-in lay the problem. My original center caps were in bad shape. One was missing and two were broken. Only one was usable and even then it was cloudy and scratched up.
I have been collecting replacement caps for a while and have built up quite the collection. Whenever one appeared on eBay that I thought was usable and was a good price, I’d buy it. The center caps Ferrari sell now do fit, but are not of the correct design. They are made from grey plastic with a paler yellow, painted design and just don’t look correct on the older cars. I sought out only the older versions on eBay, made from black ABS with a darker yellow under a thick layer of clear acrylic.
Some of my purchases were cracked, some were just scratched and dull. One had even suffered some sort of chemical damaged that had bubbled and cracked the clear plastic. With the Superformance wheels now on the car. The time had come to restore the best four I had, or at least find four that roughly matched in their shade of yellow and fit them to the car.
My plan was to sand down the acrylic layer to remove any scratches and chips and hopefully also remove any UV weathering that had dulled the surface. Being lazy, I acquired a 50mm three jaw lathe chuck and a 12mm straight arbor to fit the lathe chuck to my cordless drill. The lathe chuck was able to securely and safely grip the center caps from the inside.
The first job was to spin up the center caps and hit them with 80 grit sandpaper to rapidly remove the top layer of clear plastic. Next, was 100 grit, then 200 and then 400. Finally I used aluminum polish to bring the shine back to the now matte center caps.
The result was good… not perfect but good. There was no fixing the deep physical damage on a couple of the caps – the cracks were just too deep. Try as I might, I also could not fix the chemically damaged cap. Under the chemical burn, the acrylic was cracked and crumbly.
I did however manage to create a set of 4 good caps from the ones I had. After 50 years, there is still some discoloration in the acrylic but you cannot really tell unless you compare them all side-by-side. However, it feels good to finally complete the restoration I had long planned for these disparate eBay finds.
Disclaimer: This website describes the restoration work I perform on my car and only my car. I am not a professional mechanic. The website content is presented for entertainment purposes only and should not by seen as any kind of advice, information, instruction or guidance for working on any other car. The opinions stated here are my own and no-one else’s.
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