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I have a few of these plastic Riviera wheels and thought I might put one in my '55.
This is how I fixed my aged and cracked steering wheel. This is the first time I’ve attempted to restore one. Having seen several wheels restored on the HAMB, I was thinking that this would be totally different because it’s plastic, not acrylic (or whatever older wheels were made of) and wasn’t sure what I would use to fix it.
The epoxy like JB seemed too hard and might have issues bonding to the soft plastic. Then I remembered fixing the rear bumper on my ’95 Roadmaster Wagon with a plastic ‘bondo’ that was flexible and bonded very well. So I am doing the same fix here.
The first thing to do was to de-grease the wheel. I used quick-prep but denatured alcohol should work just as well.
You can see that the wheel had come apart at the center pretty bad. I sanded under the part that is lifted to get all the rust and scale off, then quick cleaned it. I put a bunch of the filler into the gap and clamped it down to hold it tight until the filler hardened.


Each end of the center bar looked like this.


This is how I fixed my aged and cracked steering wheel. This is the first time I’ve attempted to restore one. Having seen several wheels restored on the HAMB, I was thinking that this would be totally different because it’s plastic, not acrylic (or whatever older wheels were made of) and wasn’t sure what I would use to fix it.
The epoxy like JB seemed too hard and might have issues bonding to the soft plastic. Then I remembered fixing the rear bumper on my ’95 Roadmaster Wagon with a plastic ‘bondo’ that was flexible and bonded very well. So I am doing the same fix here.
The first thing to do was to de-grease the wheel. I used quick-prep but denatured alcohol should work just as well.
You can see that the wheel had come apart at the center pretty bad. I sanded under the part that is lifted to get all the rust and scale off, then quick cleaned it. I put a bunch of the filler into the gap and clamped it down to hold it tight until the filler hardened.


Each end of the center bar looked like this.

