The down and dirty Nascar steelie look has always been a large focal point on the 620 build, but as the project has evolved the simple smoothie steelie look had become to look more and more out of place. Not wanting to make drastic changes as the entire suspension and body modifications had been designed around that wheel and tire profile, I decided to see if I could spice up the look of the wheels with some center aero covers. Playing with a handful of different designs, I decided to go with a simple bottlecap turbo wheel center profile to be made from carbon.

Starting with a design that worked within the wheel and a clear plan to capture the covers in place, I started by machining a male pattern of the wheel center on my 3-axis CNC from Renshape foam. After body working the pattern to a high gloss surface, I used the traditional method of gel coating and hand laminating a fiberglass female mold over top the piece. Once the mold was pulled and prepared with release agents, I hand laminated and vacuum bagged the first wheel covers using the chopped strand carbon method with woven reinforcement on the back side. While these looked amazing and very unique, they looked a bit too busy and out of place. I later opted to make a full set of gel coated and a hybrid of carbon and fiberglass covers to be painted satin black and visually disappear a bit more in the wheel profile.

To hold the aero covers in the wheel centers, I designed a center-lock style hardware system to piggyback off the existing long wheel studs and use a billet threaded nut to sandwich mount the covers in place. The wheel nuts and threaded base were hand machined on the lathe, including the large thread profiles. The hex on the nuts were finish machined in my 3-axis CNC after creating a simple jig to locate, and everything was assembled on the wheels. The overall look is amazing and really changes the entire dynamic of the wheel set. Some additional hex nut locking hardware will be added after I find how I will produce the hardware clips and pins.