jcfay

Hi all - well I received my awesome new set of wheels/tires today, but all of the balancing weights had fallen off in shipping. Not sure how that happened, but there you go. I've cleaned the wheels in case that was part of the problem, but now need to get them balanced and only have my crappy local tire chain as my option. Obviously I don't want them to ruin my new beauties, and I'm envisioning bringing them there tomorrow and them destroying them since they're used to working with throw aways most if not all of the time. Any advice? I believe they've got the standard tire balancing machines (not sure about road balancing), but wondering if there's anything I can do to ensure they don't wreck my wheels??

I may be totally neurotic about this, but they were a couple months in the making and not cheap, so I guess I've got cause for concern. I'll go postal if they even scratch them, I swear...

abcut973

Show them the wheels and ask them if they can do the job without trashing the wheels.
If not you have no choice but traveling a few miles to your nearest decent tire shop. GL

QuartzBlueP31

They may not even touch them. I took My ADV1s several places and all the shops would not touch them because of the cost. I finally found a custom wheel shop and they did the work no problem.

jcfay

Thanks. I stopped by today with a couple of the wheels and they said they could do it. The wheels are black, and they didn't have black stick-on weights so I'll just have to suffer with the silver weights and plasti-dip them or something. Lame. But I'll have to reiterate to them that these ain't cheapos and I'll go ballistic if they even scratch them slightly. I'm not sure there's a decent tire shop within miles. One option I didn't think of is there is an Audi dealer around the corner, they've got to have some experience with halfway decent wheels, right? Probably charge 2x much (the other place was $14/wheel) but I'd rather pay now than end up with wrecked wheels...

PS - the MB dealership is about 30 miles from here, and with these wheels and my coupe there's NO WAY I'm fitting all 4 into my ride at once...

CMC-63

You actually should be able to. When I got my summer tires put on, I actually could fit one tire+wheel in the trunk, two in the back and the forth one in the front seat.

Autosport7

Just stand there and watch them do it. Talk about putting pressure on them to handle them with care....

I have a friend who owns his own wheel and tire company. He is a wholesaler to a lot of these wheel vendors.
He will also hook up his family and friends as he did in the pic below on his bro-in-laws Hummer H1 wheels (absolutely awesome setup btw). You should see how careless they are with wheels and tires. To these guys who do it day in and day out, they could care less about them. He was throwing these things around like they were $6.00 wheels.

jcfay

That's exactly what I'm gonna do, if they'll let me. I know they love to drop em and let em bounce all over the place - that ain't happening. Now I'm just waiting on the damn black wheel weights which won't be here for a week , so I guess it's more time to learn about patience as a virtue...

rediesel

My black 507 have silver weights inside. It's hardley noticeable even when your staring at them from a foot away. My local shop is far from the pristine space the dealer is, but they get the job done just fine. I got some tires on Tues took over an hour for 2 - not a scratch on the wheels. Be nice to your tire guys, you're going to be spending some time and $ there in the future.

glennhl

OK, just so you know, you are NOT being neurotic. I had Costco scratch the heck out of some nice Fuchs Alloys off my 74 911S a while back and they just denied doing it. Never got a dime out of them, tried polishing out the scratches, but it broke through the anodize and looked like crap (at least to me!). And a word of warning, watching is a good thing to do, but sometimes they still screw up. I had some tires mounted by a place across from where I used to work and I watched and it was amazing some of the stupid things they tried to get the tires to seat. I tried to talk them into using a belt to cinch down the outside but they just knew it would work if they put 300 psi in them. Thank goodness they didn't ruin those wheels!!!

Good luck!

Note: I see there are no Discount Tires in your neck of the woods. Too bad. They are normally pretty darn careful and IF they do screw up, they will buy you a new wheel no matter what it costs. That's all I will go to now.

jcfay

Yeah, I'm definitely going to be nice to these guys, but I'll watch them too. Unfortunately, the wheels are going to require a fair amount of weight (you can see they'd installed about 16 1/4 oz. weights on the 1 wheel in my first post, and most of the wheels had close to that), and I'm just worried that the silver will look lousy on these Klassen wheels. Fortunately the wheels were road balanced so at least I don't have to worry about that, or changing tires (which is when most damage can occur, I gather). But I think an array of silver weights on the inside of the rim, right on the edge, would be kind of conspicuous on these wheels. But maybe I just have them do it, see what it looks like, and if I have to I plastidip them (although that'd be a pain). Man I just wish the original weights hadn't fallen off...

jcfay

Edit: hadn't attached image with original weights on wheel...

glennhl

Great looking wheels, they are going to look fantastic on your car!