Vinyl Wrapping Steering Wheel Spokes

Vinyl Wrapping Steering Wheel Spokes

MK3 Mondeos suffer from particularly bad wear on the steering wheel spokes so at some point you’re going to want to refurb/mod them. Somebody had tried to polish mine and made them much worse!

Basically you have 4 options; put up with them, replace them (very expensive), paint them (very time consuming) or vinyl-wrap them. Vinyl –wrapping sounds very daunting but it’s really quite simple and produces very attractive results for very little expense – I bought enough vinyl to wrap about 20 sets of spokes for £5.

So what are you going to need?

1. Vinyl (Obviously) - Just ordinary sign-writers vinyl. This is readily available on eBay etc. I bought a square metre but a couple of A4 sized pieces will be plenty. Personally I liked the OEM look and went for a silver that very closely matched the original Ford paint – Avery 546 EF Gloss Silver. You could use any colour or finish you like, results should be the same!

2. Some way of removing the spokes – I used a couple of plastic tyre leavers; the kind used for pedal cycles. If you don’t have these they’re worth investing in, a set should set you back less than a couple of quid. You could use a screwdriver if you think it’s worth the risk but if you slip you could do a lot of damage! I haven’t actually tried but I’d imagine the tools used to open iPods would also work quite well.

3. Very sharp scissors and the sharpest knife you can lay your hands on 4. A hairdryer – most women have these and will usually loan them to you as long as you promise to return them, if you don’t know any women stop modding your car and get out a bit more.

5. Glasses - but only if you normally need them for detailed close-up work.

6. A permanent marker – Not strictly necessary but I found it useful to label each the spokes as I took them off so I didn’t spend hours trying to work out which was which when reassembling the car.