At our meeting on Saturday, there was discussion of options for restoring or buying reproduced chrome wheels for our cars. I was aware that Coker sells reproduction wheels for $212 each and had heard of wheels being restored as an option. Rob talked about his good experience with McWheels in Slater, Iowa. Some of you might be aware that McWheels has gotten some bad press on V8Buick and other forums for slowness, delays, and substandard communication. However, Rob and a few others that chimed in on the forums have had consistently good service from them. Rob shared the phone number for the owner, Curt McKim and I called him today on my way home from our meet. He’s an easy guy to talk with and was very helpful on the phone. He offers three options for wheel restoration or reproduction. The lowest cost option he can perform if the chrome is continuous and there is no rust on the rims. He claims he can make these into about an 8 (of 10) on the appearance scale. The second option, which I’m interested in, is to weld restored centers into new chromed rims. In this process he restores the centers by cleaning, polishing the chrome, bead blasting and painting the colored areas. He offers about 5 choices of paint for the centers including light and dark Argent Silver and three different gloss levels of black. The restored centers are then welded into the new chromed rims. One advantage of this process is that he can weld them together with whatever backspacing you want. The rims are made in the USA by a large wheel manufacturer and chrome plated by a company in Ohio (he didn’t know the name). These wheels are guaranteed to be straight and true, with “like new” appearance. His third option is to take your wheels, remove and restore the centers and send the original rims out for straightening and replating. This option is used by folks that want to maintain code markings and/or date codes for judging. Since our 14” wheels have no markings on them, there would be no need to take this third option for the GS wheels.
Cost for the second option is $160 per wheel, plus shipping. You can either send your wheels to him to harvest the centers for restoration, paying around $30 per wheel to ship them to him, or he will simply make them up using a stock of centers that he has, saving the cost of shipping wheels to him, and leaving the opportunity to sell your old wheels. He said currently he could have a set completed in about 3-4 weeks. I wouldn’t count on that timing, since he’s a retired “one man band”, and noting some of the criticism of his timing estimates. Costs for the other options were not stated so precisely. He said the third option cost 2-3 times that of the second ($160) option and that the first option is significantly less than the second.
Curt’s phone number is (515) 228-0013. Give him a call if interested.
I also reached out to Caruso Performance, a company that got high marks from posters on an Oldsmobile forum. He responded that he can’t get the replacement chromed rims anymore due to his low volume, so he’s not restoring or reproducing wheels anymore. The prices that were still on his site for reproduction wheels that seem to be processed identically to Curt’s were in the $260 each range.
Chuck
