Hot Rods Painting whitewalls black, is it possible?

I have 4 whitewalls on my roadster and one tire is bulging and I just don't want to spend all the money to get 4 matching tires again. Especially when they all have good tread on each tire. Is there such a thing as painting them or black portal walls? Tires like these are not available anymore.

 

What is the black paint going to do for the tire that is bulging ? The best and safest thing to do is to replace the bulging tire, or with a pair if this particular tire is no longer available. How old are the tires ?

 

I read this to mean he can replace it with a blackwall version, wants to cover the remaining 3 to match.

 

...done this many times, just get some cheap flat black spray paint at Walmart or Menards, spray the whitewalls, it'll dry to look just like the tire.

 

Or turn them around.

 

almost works on a fully fendered car, - not so much on a hi-boy……..

 

How 'bout spending less than $300 and get 4 black sidewall radial tires from any tire store in the country?

 

I know you can make a cheap white wall with Flexseal.

I do not know how well the black flexseal matches tire rubber

 

This is a first
10 - 20 years ago one of the more common thread subjects here was various ways of making white walls out of black walls.

I'll second the question, how old are they?

 

https://www.millertire.com/categories/tire-supplies/paint/

 

Flat black Krylon works great.
But yeah, if one is failing the others aren't far behind. Time to replace them all...

 

Perspective.....it's all about perspective.

That's what, a 20-30K car? Maybe More?
I think I could swing $1000 for a new set.
Some cars it may be appropriate decorate in "Early American Trailer Park". This roadster is not one of them.
Then there's the safety issue. I'm with Moriarity, bais ply. Whatever you do, new skins all around.

 

I’d use the semi flat black from VHT. It high temp paint for engine painting. Then turn the tires around on the wheels.

 

I will also agree here.. and what others have said.

REPLACE THEM ALL ! ! ! !

If one is coming apart the others will follow and thats your LIFE on those tires...

Unless this is a trailer queen and does not get driven paint them.

 

I have used the Miller Tire paint and it works well.

 

What is the brand name of the failed tire? Spread the word...I personally don’t want to buy any of their tires.

 

Hello,

The cost of getting 4 new tires is minimal compared to the safety of driving your hot rod all over with the safety factor in mind. There is nothing better than feeling those new tires grab and roll smoothly down the road. The cost, it is minimal, even it it is over $1200.00. Think of it as a $100 per month insurance policy for your family, friends, and you. You have already saved the money by not taking a extended long vacation this past year. So, it is money in the bank.

Forget the paints, they are good on flat surfaces, but if there is any flex, which a tire provides, then it will look good after the spray. But, will crack as soon as you make several turns and go over some bumps. It is not worth the effort. As teenagers, we did solve our sedan dilemma of whitewalls by turning them to the inside. Then in a week or so, they were dark enough to disappear. For a while, we had custom cars with whitewalls on the inside. Ha!

The ones that did not turn them to the inside and painted them with varying compositions paints, cracked in all situations. Then the paints came back out again, wasting tons of valuable time and energy.

Jnaki

Your roadster is cool, but think about safety down the line. If one tire has a bulge, others may not be far behind. YRMV

 

Your car is very nice .

3 options

get new tires if your are old.

I’ve seen old tires do just what going on with your tire failure.
Had a buddy snafu a near perfect 79 Vette cause he drove it with old tires that blew apart and took most of the fibre glass with it.

1. A porta wall to try n match it to your white walls

2. paint your remaining tires with black paint or visit a tire shop , they have a black paint that they paint sidewalls on used tires with to get them new looking .

3 replace your tires.


Your choice, there’s your options.


Again, sweet ride !

 

I'll agree on the concept that that tire bulge means that that tire is on it's way to coming apart.
I'd also have to say that even though the tread looks good the tires are well beyond their safe age to run on the highway. I never had an age issue with radials on my 48 because I always wore the tires out before they aged out.

 

If you insist on painting the whitewalls black instead of replacing them with blackwalls, find house paint store that sells 100% flat black acrylic house paint, usually the 100% acrylics have the properties of a elastomeric paint which is designed to expand and contract to weather conditions, it is also used for application over rubber membrane roofing material.

I use to use it on white letter tires, it held up better than anything else I ever tried. HRP

 

This is what you use when you have torn up white letters on the POS you are flipping. I have no idea how long it lasts but it is formulated for this purpose.

 

You haven't priced rubber lately have you!?

 

Miller tire paint great stuff new tires great too

 

One cheapskate to another Just kidding.
I would replace both tires on the axle with black wall. (you did not say front or rear)
Then later replace the other 2 when you feel like it. A injury to a tire can cause separation (Bulge)
We have all seen hotrods before with mismatched tires.

With that being said, when I retreaded semi truck tires we painted them when finished.
We wrote on the side of the tire instructions with a wax crayon to indicate needed repairs, what tread to put on etc... They were a mess. With final inspection, grinding rubber of repairs & then paint they looked pretty good, ready for delivery and the paint lasted.
6 months later truck pulls in for a flat repair, you did not see all the writing from when was retreaded.
We bought tire paint in 5 gallon buckets from the tire supply shops we dealt with.

I was taught by a old timer how to make paint when we ran short in-between shipments.
We had uncured rubber being thrown in the trash. Every tire creates a little.
You take the uncured rubber, mix it with gasoline and let it sit and break down.
Takes about 24 hours to get paint ... just mix 3 or 4 times a day. The goo settles to the bottom, mix it up and stir it and you have good paint.

Sooo, you find a retread shop near you, you go dumpster diving in the trash can and grab all the raw rubber you can grab. You cut the rubber into small pieces and mix up your paint.
You can also put the rubber on a hot plate and warm it. You can shape it like play dough.
Make a body mount or a rubber shim. Something you would not need often, but you could make it if you needed to.
At 210 Fahrenheit for 3 hours the rubber will cure. It will no longer be affected by a hot plate.
I would not want to buy a whole roll of the stuff for $100, but having a bucket full of the trash they throw away would be handy.

 

Sorry Mark, that is only partially true. You won't find even one tire manufacturer that will state any 'expiration' date on their product, and you won't even find that from the vehicle manufacturers. What you will find is a 'recommendation' that the tire be 'inspected' by a 'competent tire tech' at whatever time period they decided on, which can be from six years to ten depending on who you talk to, some make no time recommendation at all. How this worked out in the real world is the retailers glommed onto this (helped by some alarmist reporting by the trade press) and these 'inspections' consist of the sales person checking the date code and declaring your tire as 'unsafe' and they'll refuse to service it because of 'liability'. Pretty easy new tire sale, eh? If you find somebody who actually inspects one beyond reading the date code, let me know.

The six year period recommendation came out of testing done by Ford, Goodyear and the NHTSA in the wake of the Ford/Firestone debacle. This testing was done in Phoenix Arizona which has the highest average ambient temps in an urban area, and was picked because the vast majority of those failures occurred in the sun belt. Buried in the original draft report was the fact that tire ageing due to heat was exponential, Phoenix is the worse-case. Reduce the heat even moderately, aging slows rapidly. Keep in mind this testing was primarily done as a CYA exercise by the industry to prevent lawsuits in the future. I'll also note here that the NHTSA was unable (after reviewing several years worth of state accident reports) to find even ONE documentable case of an 'aged' tire being the cause of an accident. All this information was in the final draft version, the final report deleted much of it.

The real problem with the Ford/Firestone combo was Ford specified below-normal inflation pressures to improve ride quality. This was common practice for years in Detroit, and I suspect many in the hobby still do this. Put a large over-sized tire on with load capability far beyond actual car weight, many will reduce tire pressure to improve ride. With a bias-ply, adjusting pressure would also improve tread wear by maintaining the tread 'flat' to the road surface. None of that is true with radials. While a bias-ply will 'flex' everywhere, distributing the generated heat evenly, a radial doesn't. They have a more rigid belted tread and the tire flex is concentrated in the sidewall, along with the heat. This is what killed those Firestone tires, and I strongly suspect that many of the antidotal reports here are the same cause. The other thing they discovered in underinflated radials is the sidewalls are less resilient to impact damage and failure. If you're running radials, keeping tire pressures at no less than 28 PSI at a minimum will make a big difference.

 

Burnouts and hard cornering will fix the good thread issue.

 

My friend Doug's '34. Always garage kept, good tread, no checking on sidewalls, etc.
Fairly low mileage, but more than five years old. Luckily, no damage to him or the car.

 

https://www.edmunds.com/car-maintenance/how-old-and-dangerous-are-your-tires.html

sidewall abnormalities
https://m.tirerack.com/tires/tiretech/techpage.jsp?techid=32

 

I have some old Montgomery Wards Whitewall paint if you want to reverse it.