My rims are F'd!!!

darien87 · Mar 10, 2013

So I get a Maximum Motorsporst camber kit and tires put on my 07 GT today. The mechanic isn't able to align the car because of the rim savers on the tires. But I have lifetime aligment at Firestone so I take it there to get aligned. I get home and look at my rims and they look like this!!!

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There are deep gouges about 3/4" around the edge of pretty much all of my rims. I'm pretty sure this happened at the tire place as Firestone should have only been messing with the front tires. An alignment doesn't involve the rear tires at all does it?

So am I safe in assuming this was done by the tire place? I'm so pissed off and I'm going to call them first thing in the morning. Unfortunately my rims aren't made anymore but I want some sort of compensation.

95PGTTech · Mar 10, 2013

Those are marks left by the alignment machine's "heads". They should be on all four rims as each wheel gets a sensor.

darien87 · Mar 11, 2013

Thanks for the info. I have 5-spoke rims and the gouges are on every spoke on every rim. So how did this happen? They don't need to spin the tires to do an alignment do they?

jetmech807 · Mar 11, 2013

Looks more like gouges made by the tire machine forcing the tire over the bead when the tire was installed on the rim. Aligment heads genearlly slip between the lip and tire.

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darien87 · Mar 11, 2013

jetmech807 said:
Looks more like gouges made by the tire machine forcing the tire over the bead when the tire was installed on the rim. Aligment heads genearlly slip between the lip and tire.

Thanks Jet. Yeah I showed my car to America's Tire and they said it looked like the gouges were caused by the "duck head" from the other shop not using the correct spacer when putting the tires on. So I e-mailed them pics and they're actually being really cool about it. They're trying to find a mobile rim repair guy to come out and fix my rims.

95PGTTech · Mar 12, 2013

darien87 said:
Thanks for the info. I have 5-spoke rims and the gouges are on every spoke on every rim. So how did this happen? They don't need to spin the tires to do an alignment do they?

If there are five of them, it would be from the tire mounting msachine (alignment heads only use four mounting points). Most Hunter alignment heads go between the rim and the lip but they do offer a kit for mounting on tires such as these with the rim protectors where it actually grabs onto the face of the wheel (but there are plastic protectors). If there are only 4 marks per rim, that would be from the alignment.

No, there is nothing needed as far as mounting/balancing for the alignment. Depending upon the machine, sometimes the car is jacked up once it is on the alignment rack and the wheels are rotated a few degrees back and forth once the heads are mounted to calibrate them. Most of the newer equipment is set up to calibrate by mounting the heads then rolling the car forward and back on the rack a few feet.

My rims are F'd!!!

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