Not saying this is the ultimate guide but it's the process that has worked for me and seeing as the BBS RA's are a fiddley wheel to paint i thought it might be worth posting the technique i found which avoided any runs or mess-ups in the painting process.
The other very important point is to make sure at very regular points you wipe off the excess paint from the nozzle on the paint tin, the paint will build up here and if you don't wipe it off you'll spray the tin and put droplets of paint into the finish resulting in the need to wait for it to dry before you can sand/flat it back out. Also don't shake the tin near the wheel without cleaning the nozzle or you may chuck droplets of paint into the air, i was painting in a small shed and wondered why one of the wheels already done had two droplets on them
The technique remains the same for the etchprimer, normal primer and paint stages, when lacquering the wheels remember that the lacquer is thinner than the paint and you'll need to hold the tin a little further away from the wheel to aviod any nasty runs, lacquers a sod as it builds up and you don't notice it's either run or built up too heavily until it's too late.
First off start the wheel with the valve hole at bottom dead centre or 6:00 on the clock face, simple reason is as you paint and rotate the wheel it's the best indication of knowing when you've gone round the whole wheel. Make sure you warm the paint tin up in some hot water as it'll help the paint adhere and also maximises the speed of the propellant.
Do not put any paint in the top edges of the spokes as by the time you spray the inside edges you'll load up too much paint and they'll run. Start off with one spray to each of the inside edges of the triangles rotating the wheel as you go, i had the tin 10-15 centimetres away from the wheel. Once you have gone round the hole wheel the next item are the wheel bolt holes, again no painting the face of the rim as you end up putting too much paint the the leading edges and they'll run. Putting the valve hole at bottom dead centre again put one spray into each of the four holes as you see them, then rotate and spray again, repeat until you have gone all the way round, four rotations worked for me.
Next stage is to paint the rim, at 45 degrees paint the rim rotating the wheel, the angle helps give coverage to both faces of the rim. Finally yo can now paint the face of the wheel, again 10-1 cms away go left to right over the face of the wheel, remember to rotate the wheel as it will help apply the paint to the inner edges of the lattice design on the face.
Leave the wheel to dry for about 10 minutes and then stand the wheel up so you can paint the inside of the wheel. Tilt the wheel slighty towards you, i used a thin role of masking tape to do this, the nest item is to carefully spray into each of the spoke holes from the back of the wheel, this will help get the coverage on the bottom faces of the triangles as you won't get them all from the front, also check the inner edges of the spokes and spray once up each side where needed, once you have gone all the way round you can paint the inside face of the wheel back, nothing to say other than rotate the wheel as you go.
You'll probably need to replace the newspaper that the wheel was sitting on at this point as quite a bit of paint gets through the spokes and builds up on the paper nicely.
Sit the wheel so it's face up and at right angles paint the flat'ish edge of the wheel lip (might not be possible if you doing this with the tyres on, i had mine removed for the re-furbishing)
Leave the wheel to dry for a further 15 minutes and then you can go again on the second coat repeating the above process. As i was re-furbing all four at the same time it made it easy as i was painting them in rotation order so the first was ready for it's second coat by the time wheel 4 had been painted.
As i said at the beginning just be very careful with the lacquer stage as it's much thinner than the paint and will run alot easier, i used the same technique holding it the same distance away and got a couple of small patches where it had gathered too much so i would advise holding it further away 15-20 cms and rememeber as i put 4-5 coats of lacquer on you don't have to paint it on the first go. With hindsight it might have been better to leave a little longer between lacquer coats to avoid build up of wet lacquer.
Finally you're ready to paint the lacquer on to the wheel you must do this no more than 30 minutes after the last coat of wheel colour has gone on, by not letting the wheel colour cure completely the lacquer has a better chance of adhering to the top colour and should stop the risk of peeling/lifting at a later stage.
HTH
Jeremy.
