Painting the hubcaps on a Sprinter Van
Here they are…
The standard hubcaps found on the the Mercedes Benz factory steel wheels. They’re simple. They’re plastic. And they just friction fit to the lug nuts. Nothing to them really. In all black, they’re not bad looking either. But why stop there. We wanted to see what these would like like if if painted a new and fun color. You gotta make your van stand out from all the other out there right? Right?
I’m feeling blue
So, our first color was not a success. I mean, we did this with some blue Plasti-dip we has laying around. And blue was a cool accent color that folks like OwlVans use. We figured, why not. On top of that, Plasti-dip was not only a great way to play around with colors, but we could use it as a base layer, a primer of sorts that we could paint on top of and paint whatever we wanted. Eventually being able to peal all the layers off later on. This was our theory.
Inspired: Feeling blue
This is what we used.
A simple spray can version to easily apply the Plasti Dip. When getting serious and covering larger areas, you might want to consider buying bulk and getting a dedicated spray gun to make easy work of it.
Red and Blue
Yup, that’s our Fiat 500 too. Having fun with colored wheels can make your car or van look completely different. There have been trends since the days of race cars customized with color specific livery. Now it’s moving on to other vehicles including vans.
Take 2: Going gold!
Gold wheels were quite the trend in the 70’s and 80’s. Inspired by magnesium wheels from race cars of the past they were brought in by marketing teams to make cars feel more luxurious. The 80’s was an interesting time. Jeep, Lexus and Mercedes were all victims of this trend with gold badging and all. Well, it seems now that trend is coming back stronger than ever. This time however, a little less gold bling and more magnesium.
Night time makes the gold pop… yo!
Take 3: Matchy Matchy!
A nod back to the old school Mercedes Benz look
Back in the day…
Mercedes was known for cars that had body color matched hubcaps. The oh-so ubiquitous W123 300TD was the epitome of this styling trend. Coming in typically muted color like across the pale blues, yellows, oranges and reds these beautifully crafted hubcaps really made the Benz a premium product.
From Gold to Blue
The gold was fun. It wasn’t half bad and gave us a chance for a change. But now it’s time to try to get that color matched look. We had this Spray Paint VHT Engine Enamel Metallic Titanium Silver Blue engine paint laying around in our stash of paint in the shop. This was like an old school Pontiac or Oldsmobile engine color. It was close to our Grey Blue Sprinter color so we tried it out to see how it might look. It’s not a perfect match but really close to get the overall feel.
It’s a bit more metalic of a blue then the color of our van but it makes for a close match and looked fairly close. This gave us what we need to see if we wanted to go all in and get it truly to match the pain of our 2020 Sprinter Van.
The folks at Explorist.Life painted their whole van with Plasti Dip for under $800! Seems like an interesting option. Check out our post using Plasti Dip on our rocker panels here. We tried this as an alternative to the truck liner technique we’ve seen using a spray gun and bulk Plasti Dip
