When my father gave me the tractor it had late 1940s solid 16" ford rims on the front with thin tires. The rims were navy blue with two thin tan stripes encircling the small chrome ford hub caps. When I was a kid, I took them off and threw them in the family dump (that's against the law today to have a family dump) and put on some big fat "mud dogs" with flat black rims. To return to how it was when my father gave the red flyer to me, I found two rims at a tractor show here in Hebron. After having them sandblasted, I primed and painted them navy blue and before clear coating painted on two thin tan stripes.
Now the back rims were a completely different story. They are late 1920s LaSalle wooden spoke rims. They were painted with many coats of red tractor paint. I stripped them with paint stripper and revealed the wood spokes and decided to polyurethane the wood.
After many coats of primer and lots of hours of water sanding, now the rear rims are looking great with new red paint and 3 coats of polyurethane on the spokes. Even my wife, Marie, helped me out untaping the wooden spokes.
