I had a badly corroded wheel from a windowless T carcass. It needed work on the hard to get at metal near the leather cover.. I used a super flexible (think cheap) old artists pallet knife that was about 1/2" wide as a backer for strips of self-adhesive emery paper. I think I settled on 150 or 240 grit from the body shop. The end of blade with sand paper was thin enough to run right up under the leather cover at the end of the spokes. If you sand in the direction of the metal grain, you can blend it in with the easier to get at part of the spoke (that you did with Chuck Leeper or jim0207 's method).
Side note: I used a vinyl/leather repair kit for the nicks and cracks in the leather grip before sanding those repairs with super fine paper. It then got prepped and dyed it to match. The stitching was still good. In the end the leather turned out not very soft but looks good and has a satin finish.