painting hub caps????

[beautimus]

has anyone here repainted their stock white dogdish hubcaps? i mean the 71 ish kind with the blue bow tie. how did you mask them off did you do it free hand or is there a template available? any help would be greatly appreciated.
thanks, tony

[mosesburb]

I do not have painted hub caps, but I did one of my stainless (or whatever they are) ones. The black ring around the center had been removed by the sun and looked strange so I figured it woudl look better if I repainted it.

If you look closely at a couple of the caps, you'll notice the accuracy of the original GM job was pretty loose at best leaving much room for improvement or fudge factor. I masked the inside and outside of the painted ring area with "fine-line" masking tape and then used two inch masking tape trimmed to fit around that. It came out pretty good. There is only one spot that I did not get the tape lined up with itself, so there is a spot where the inner circle has a tiny notch in it.
Any automotive paint store should have the fine-line masking tape. My recommendation would be to get the plastic version of the tape as opposed to the narrow paper masking tape.

If you spend some time on it and have a sharp razor blade or hobby knife, you should be able to do a very good job of it. I did not feel like taking mine off the truck, so doing it on a bench or desk would probably be much easier.

[special-K]

There`s also a vinyl masking product used by sign painters.I want to try that.But,I`ve stripped,primed,painted,and detail painted the caps before using masking tape.I think the factory used a stencil.