Well guys - I was doing a "mid winter" assessment of how lil Red is holding up under his first snow season and.... everything is looking pretty good. The cheap "driver quality" trim rings are not going to make it, and the outside mirrors are getting a little pockmarked but everything else (especially anything painted "red") is holding up ok.
At any rate, I noticed a little trick that I hadn't shared with you all yet:
I was looking at my tires. They are just a cheap P235/75R15 of some type, but they are whitewalls. Naturally, for the ones on the ground I just had them mounted with the whitewall "in", but I didn't want to see the w/w from underneath the truck.
So - I just painted over them, allowing the black Krylon from painting the backside of the rally wheel to go over the tire sidewall.
That's probably not a big deal but then I realized that the spare tire up in the bed of the truck was going to be visible from both sides - and - that the white wall would also be visible and not match. So I did the same thing: just put a nice coat of Krylon on the back sidewall of the tire.
I know it sounds hokey. It cracked a little bit where the tire pulled into the bed rail upon installation but, other than that, so far so good...
