Last fall I picked up a set of project rims on a whim. I don't know what posessed me to buy them. They are widely considered to be the ugliest factory rim Honda ever created (or, arguably, the ugliest factory rim period). Some people call them "Buttons" while others call them "Phone Dials." They came stock on the 1986-1987 CRX Si here in the US. These days, people would rather sell them as aluminum scrap than mount tires on them. I saw them as a unique project, an experiment, or at the very least, a set of winter beaters.

See more pictures of this of this project after the jump.

At first, I was just going to clean them up a little bit, respray them in a flat aluminum color like they were stock, slap on some glossy clear coat, and roll with them like that. The masochist inside me decided that they should be polished. By hand.

I started with about $50 worth of sanding and painting supplies. Each rim took about 6 hours to get through the process of stripping, sanding, and polishing the faces. The end result on the first rim looked better than I had expected. I had a perfect mirror finish on the face, though I did admittedly get lazy on prepping the lip of the rim for paint. Unfortunately, the center cap was plastic and there was no way to make it match. I kept them on as a reminder of the color they used to be.

I worked for three more days on the others until I had a finished set of beaters. In the end, I was pleased with the result. But they didn't have tires and I still wouldn't have an idea of how they really looked until I had them on the car. This was meant to be an experiment, though. It was too late to back down now. I ordered some tires and waited patiently for a free weekend.

The general consensus across three car forums was that they were polished turds that looked good in theory, but probably wouldn't look good on a gold 2000 Civic sedan. People said that they might look good on an EF or EG Civic, but putting them on an EK Civic was a mistake. (They never looked good on the CRX they were intended to be on, so maybe putting them on any car is a mistake.) I decided to find out for myself. The tires came in, got mounted and balanced, and I put them on the car.

In the end I had to agree with the forums. They were the wrong rims for this car. They were the wrong rims for any car. But I still rocked them through the winter.

Would you rock some uglies for the winter? Or just to be unique? Or even as an anti-theft device?