Hey, my brother works at a VW shop here in the Denver area and they sell
those wheels to aircooled guys, and he's never had a complaint about them.
I can't say 100% that they're all perfectly balanced, but if aircooled guys
are buying them for high dollar projects, well, they have to be ok.  The
next time they get a set in I'll see if we can check the balance on one or
two.

Hey, wait a minute, if they sell these, that means I can get em at cost!  :)
Maybe I'll have to swap my Passat steelies out for em.  They'd look pretty
slick with my big 'ol BFGs on them.

----- Original Message -----
From: "The Bus Depot" <vanagon@BUSDEPOT.COM>
To: <vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM>
Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2003 10:38 AM
Subject: Re: BRM wheel pictures -- heres the link

> > 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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>