Since we drive the Boxster all year round, cleaning the wheel bolts has been an annual rite of Spring. There are twenty wheel bolt on the Boxster.  Porsche does not treat them to prevent rusting. 

The entire process of sanding, painting, and to remount the tire usually took the better part of a day.  This task was usually done in conjunction with changing to the Summer tires.  The first time we did it was kind of fun.  Ok...sanding the first bolt was kind of fun.  Now we make the interns clean them as part of their "training".

Last year we decided to paint the bolts to see if that would keep the rust off.  No...it didn't work :-)  THIS year we thought we would give the interns a break.  We got twenty chrome-plated wheel bolts from Boothe Design to replace all of the rusty ones on the Boxster.

We will still polish the old ones and use them for the Winter, but we are going to see if we can find some better way to rust-proof them with some kind of rust inhibiting spray paint.

The bolts showed up today and he guys at RainyDayGarage were amazed at the quality.  These are "car show" quality parts... almost much too nice for our daily drive Boxster :-)

We'll post some photos of these bolts when we install them.  They are going to look amazing.  BTW, if you can tell us what else we got and how much, we'll send you a little token for your efforts.

UPDATE:  We got Noah Lambert's email (timestamped 3:22AM) correctly identifing the other Boothe Porsche goodies as the SoftSocket and Wheel Hanger.  The socket is so we don't scratch the bolts.  The hanger makes it a snap to align the holes when replacing the bolts.  Noah asked for a 997 Turbo as his prize.  We are going to send him one, along with everything Porsche is selling in '06.

Here is a closer look at the SoftSocket and Wheel Hanger. With what Porsche is charging for their cars, they should be sourcing their parts from Boothe Design ...like the folks at Rolls-Royce.

The problem is our wheel bolts always get REALLY rusty over the Winter.  We clean and paint them every Spring, but can't seem to keep the rust from coming back.

This year we decided to try something new.  We have decided to replace all of the rusty bolts with these gorgeous bolts from Boothe Design.

The bolts are beautiful, but think twice about the SoftSocket :-)

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