Well, they wither flunked out of NASCAR Pit Crew School, or have
another "sideline" business when not working at the tire shop.....

I'm very fortunate here in town to have a Tire Rack approved
installer that does this stuff out of his shop at his house, and he
has all the high tech mounting equipment.  He's never charged me more
than $10 to mount and balance a tire, even alloys where he manually
buffs the sealing surface so the nitrogen doesn't leak out over
time.  He also has a mobile service where he comes to your house to
do the work.

Tire Rack has a list of approved installers on their website.  Maybe
check them out the next time you need work done to see if there's one
near your house.  I would think they of all shops would not gouge
someone that bought tires at Tire Rack.  If they did, I'd report them
to TR Customer Service.

I didn't think the General Altimas had stiff enough sidewalls for the
Vanagon, but then you may have put those tires on a non Vanagon, come
to think of it.  We have the unidirectional Generals on our Outback
and the bi-directional Altimas on our Legacy and they have been great
tires for the money.

DM&FS

At 03:34 PM 3/26/2011, David M wrote:
>I went looking for a place to install my mail-order (Tire Rack)
>General Altimax tires. I was determined not to hand over to my local
>Firestone place the $60 the last pair of tires cost me to get
>mounted. So I went to the 'poorer' section of town... to Bob's Tire
>Corral. Well it turned out that Bob was nowhere in sight, only Jaime
>and Jorge. No-one spoke English and all the signs were only in
>Spanish. However, they did know how to say 'Thirty Dollar' and they
>did understand 'Ok'. I drove the van over to the ancient machines
>and two guys appeared like a pit crew. One jacked up the left rear
>wheel and one jacked up the right rear wheel. I tried to say I
>wanted to keep one of the tires as a spare but they did not
>understand. I tried to tell them the tire pressures I wanted but
>they had no clue what I was
>  saying. I've no idea if I got new tire valves. I did not get a
> receipt. But I was out of there in 15 minutes with the tires
> mounted at half the cost of Firestone.