MPeery

Yesterday I took my 99.5 A4 1.8T QMS into the local Firestone tire shop to have a screw removed from one of my SP8000 tires. I picked up the car and the wheel (nice '99 sport pkg wheel) was damaged during the tire repair. The damage is a small ding or two the size of an eraser on the end of a pencil. There is also some abrasion on the edge of the wheel where it comes into contact with the wheel in several places. In all cases the damaged areas go through the clearcoat and silver layer down to white?

I've taken super good care of these wheels waxing them by hand 6 or so times since I had the car. Now the wheel is damaged and the brake dust can get in and cause more damage to the finish.

I plan to go back to Firestone today and talk with the manager. I assume it's possible to repair a tire on these wheels without damaging the rims? How much does a new wheel cost?

Any advice on how to handle this would be great.

Thanks!

Mark

WClark

A lot of these places do not have suitable tire mounting equipment to avoid cosmetic damage to alloy wheels and their employees dont take any steps to avoid damage. This is simply because 99% of the customers dont give a rats a...

Hopefully you can get some compensation from them. In the future I recommend you find a shop that is recommended by others because it is known to be careful. When I wanted to have a set of new snow tires from Tire Rack mounted on my brand new sport OEM wheels (and the new Pirelli's taken off for other use) I used the shops listed at the Tire Rack site for my area to narrow the search. I ended up at a small local shop and was delighted at the service and reasonable price.