As I write now after the burn, aware of what was to befall them in our tumultuous trip to the playa, it pains me to see these gorgeous wheel covers.

But at the time they were gorgeous, and once we get the wheels rebalanced and the covers reinstalled with plenty of insulating/gripping silicone caulk, they will be gorgeous once again.

This involved a couple of days of futzing and fiddling – I bought the wrong sized wheel covers at first from Hubcap Mike, and wound up drilling a bunch of holes in the wrong places in a way that would ensure failure.

The best method for mounting these – since the wheels have to be drilled for mounting holes – is to get the wheels off the vehicle, the tires off the wheels, the wheels set up flat on a table top – and to do it all in a well-lit, well-equipped shop.

Since they’re bigass wheels with 8 lugnuts each on a multi-ton vehicle that no shop with a lift would take for any amount of love or money, I did it instead in the driveway – with the wheels and tires still on the van – using a power drill to grind three precisely-located holes through the steel lip of each wheel without puncturing the sidewall behind it, then tapping the holes for 10-32 screws.

Whee.

After many sweaty hours and not a small amount of foul language, I managed to get them mounted.

They looked pretty good.