Action Wheel & Tire - should you get your wheels fixed here?

We all eventually experience this...that big "thud" or "bang"...maybe you saw it coming at the very last minute but couldn't avoid it, or maybe it got ya without you even so much as having any clue it was coming...ahh...the dreaded pothole!!!

If you are lucky, that gaping road hazard is physically small enough not to have caused any damage to your tire and/or the wheel (rim). On the other hand, if the pothole was large, or worse yet, you are running a low profile tire which just isn't going to be able to flex all that much and absorb the hit, you are now potentially experiencing a wheel wobble, a repeating harmonic, or in a case of absolute disaster your tire is punctured and you are sitting on a flat.

Either way, whether you have a flat or not, one thing may be certain: your wheel/rim is now bent!

What this means is that the pothole was sufficiently large that when the tire thread hit the oncoming edge it was completely compressed and the wheel lip itself actually contacted the edge of the pothole. All that energy of the car moving was transferred into the body of the wheel, effectively bending something. Now that the wheel is bent the circumference of the wheel and the tire itself is no longer round, there effectively are high and low spots...subsequently as you drive and the tire rolls each time one of these low or high spots is encountered you hear that rythimc "wobble" type sound, or worse yet, you feel it directly in your streering wheel.

So what to do now?

Well, you could replace the wheel...the car dealership is probably all too happy to sell you a new one...but that'll most likely cost you the proverbial "arm and a leg", so you look for a cheaper alternative. Indeed, there are some...you can contact a wheel/rim reconditioning shop and ask them to straighten/fix the rim, and so this is where my personal experience with Action Wheel & Tire starts.

I had originally contacted Art at the Wheel Covers Unlimited Inc's Howard Ave. location. We discussed my concern, I was impressed, he understood what the damage may be and we promoptly set up an appointment at their Action Wheel & Tire location on Walker Road (both locations are part of a family business I was told). A couple of days later I showed up for my appointment.

Now here is a bit of a personal disclosure, I am somewhat of a car hobbyist, meaning, I have personally built a few high performance engines, transmissions, rear-ends, right down to setting up the suspension for proper pinion yoke geometry, so I am not your average car driver and most of my stuff is measured down to the 0.001", that's 1/1000th of an inch. Therefore I hope you'll excuse my horror when having asked the shop owner how they actually measure the amount the wheel is bent I was shown the spinning wheel on the tire balancer and heard "...see? that wobble is where the wheel is bent...". OK, OK...but the owner did not know about my experience, so to be fair I explained that prior to bringing the car in I had already measured the runout (how much out of perfect circular shape the rim was) and was looking for them to deliver a more precise measurement. After all, once the repair is done how does the shop actually prove to me the extent to which their fix has improved my wheel? Surely one would want a BEFORE & AFTER measurement, right?

The owner stared at me, with somewhat of a shocked look, at which point I promptly noted that this visit probably was not going to have a happy ending. Anyways, but I was there, so why not let the shop explain their process. The owner showed me a couple of buldges in the sidewall, where due to the pothole hit the internal wire of the tire was apparently damaged. She then stated that in order to fix the wheel they would have to remove the tire, but since the tire is visibly damaged they could NOT legally re-install the tire, which meant I now needed to purchase a new set of replacement tires.

Hmm...not quite what I was hoping to hear. Since a new set of tires was not in my budget, I looked at both the shop owner and the mechanic and stated: "...Tire replacement is probably not within my budget, therefore, put the wheel back on and let's price the tires first, but for now, my visit is done so we do not need to check the remaining wheels...". The owner pointed me towards the front office, she stayed behind for a few moments while I proceeded to leave the garage area.

Soon she came out, took a few minutes to look up the prices, we sat down, but as I had expected, an additional $1000 spend on tires was not planned for. I politely thanked her and said I would just settle the bill for the wheel check and would have to come back for repairs later. To my subsequent horror she replied "...but the mechanic is not done checking all your wheels, he has only finished the 2nd one and still has two more to go...".

I immediately asked her to stop the work and questioned why the mechanic proceeded to dismount a second wheel? After all, I clearly stated that we were done with the checks. Her explanation was a pre-meditated sounding "...oh, he must now have heard you...". Strange though I thought to myself, since the three of us were all there when I asked for the garage visit to be over.

You see, the shop charges $35 per wheel/rim to check for damages. If you chose to have the repairs done by them, that $35 is then applied towards the final cost...whatever that final cost may be. That is a great service, a great business model perhaps, however, it can not be based on suckering your customer into that $35/wheel committment first. In other words, had the pricing of the tires taken longer I would have been on the proverbial hook to the tune of $140+TAX. Now that in my opinion is very dishonest. This business assumes that if they can get their "hooks" into you deep enough you will not want to go somewhere else instead.

So bottom line here is, due to their practice they:

1) loose a sale of a set of replacement tires
2) loose a sale of wheel reconditioning service

I am off to find another shop, and there are plenty of them around actually. Hopefully my extra cost of $35 to simply remove a wheel and toss it on a balancing machine (wow, what crazy hourly labour rate that must be???!!!) without ever even getting a real measurement of how badly the wheel is bent saves you the sort of hassle I experienced.

In the meantime, my advice to all of you is: keep on looking since "Action Wheel & Tire" and "Wheel Covers Unlimited Inc" are not trustworthy businesses to spend your money with.

Introduction...

I've lived in Windsor, ON, Canada for a little over 15 yrs now. In that time I've had both the pleasure and dissapointment of dealing with a number of local businesses. What has consistently surprised me though is that even in today's day and age of massive social media interconnects it is still fairly difficult to find people's feedback on their experiences in obtaining goods and/or services from local enterprises.


It is for that reason therefore that I'm starting this blog. My intent here is to deliver an un-biased (as much as I can, as obviously a blog will be heavily driven by my "feel good" or "feel angry" experiences) assessment of my experiences in Windsor, ON.

Other localities have embraced this sharing approach, case in point being the very successfull Angie's List in the US. In fact they do have a link to Windsor, ON on their site, however the content is still fairly light. Hopefully people continue to embrace this approach...in the meantime however, what better way to illustrate the point than to share my personal experiences with the community, and so here we are.

If you would like to be part of that information sharing experiment I welcome your feedback...please comment on the upcoming Blog posts.