Date:         Wed, 19 Nov 2003 12:38:31 -0500
Reply-To:     The Bus Depot <vanagon@BUSDEPOT.COM>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         The Bus Depot <vanagon@BUSDEPOT.COM>
Subject:      Re: BRM wheel pictures -- heres the link
In-Reply-To:  <20031119164608.41526.qmail@web60510.mail.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

> Very cool and cheap too!
> http://store.cip1.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=CTGY&Store_
> Code=cali&Category_Code=13-03


I looked into these wheels myself a while back, having been attracted by
the rather sharp look and the relatively low price. I asked a parts
specialist in Europe with whom we have a close relationship whether he'd
tried them before. He said that while he hadn't personally, he did know
someone who had. The wheels turned out to be made in the far east
(China, I think) and were very unbalanced, a situation which he
attributed to poor quality control. He had to put a large number of
weights on each wheel in order to get them to balance properly. Given
that the price isn't that much lower than the genuine VW South African
alloys (which typically sell for around $175 each or so and are of high
quality), this less than glowing report was enough to temper my
enthusiasm. I might have considered them had the savings versus genuine
wheels been more dramatic.  To be fair, though, this was just a single
person's experience (albeit based on four wheels, of course), so it's
not exactly a huge sample size. I don't know of anyone else who has
tried them, so I couldn't say if his experience was typical.

- Ron Salmon
  The Bus Depot, Inc.
  www.busdepot.com
  (215)  234-VWVW

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