A little background, i bought an 87 GT with a 3800sc swap last year that was an unfinished project. From day one I knew I'd be in the market for new wheels and tires. The car had a hub conversion done on it and is currently a 5x4.75 pattern.
After reading pretty close to every thread on here that involves wheel size, fitment, or offset, i thought I knew exactly what I was going to need but wanted to find a shop that would measure and make sure.
Well I've run into some issues getting my wheels with the shop I was using. Waited almost a month and the couldn't produce an order. Buying a set of wheels for your car is supposed to be a fun, enjoyable thing. It's a big expense and a difficult decision, but it's also a landmark day for a car enthusiast. I'd like to thank World of Wheels in Michigan City Indiana for totally screwing that up for me.
I've been saving for wheels and tires for my 3800 Fiero since I first bought it and knew I'd have enough money after tax time. I went to world of wheels in the winter after posting on Facebook asking for advice on a good wheel shop in the area and the owner started chatting with me. After explaining that my car has been built with parts from many different cars they said they need to measure to figure out what will fit properly. I was ok with that and told them I'd bring the car over in the spring when the weather cleared.
Jump ahead to May, I take the car over to their shop to talk wheels and remind them that they would need to measure. They claim that they don't have to measure and the wheels should fit just fine, and if not they'll make it right and find me something that I'll be happy with. (that should have been red flag number one) I get a written up estimate which, they messed up the tire and wheel sizes in which we were discussing. I get the typos straightened out and I make my final decision on May 15 and ask again if they are sure they don't want to check measurements before I give them a hefty deposit. That was a Friday, the following Monday was a holiday which may affect shipping but the wheels were estimated to arrive mid week the next week. It was only supposed to be 2 day shipping from New York.
Wednesday/Thursday of the following week arrives and I call to check what's going on, the owners not in and the guy said he'd call me back in 45 minutes. (no call back, red flag number 2) I call before closing and he claims to have just gotten in yeah right, sure, but for some reason has not received tracking info on my wheels yet. Tells me they should be in next week. So I call in the next week and he still has no tracking number or any idea where my wheels are. But I'm going out of town that weekend and they should definitely be in when I get back.
Following Monday I call to find out if my wheels came in, he'll look into it and give me a call back, I recieve a call saying there's a slight issue and we need to discuss how to move forward. Come to find out the issue is with their credit card, apparently their vendor had an out of date credit card info and cancelled the order and my wheels never shipped. I told them on no big deal stuff happens, let's go ahead and reorder them, when would be an outside date for them to arrive, they tell me the end of the week again. I call in on Saturday inquiring about my wheels, they have no info on them, and tell me Monday/Tuesday.
End of my work day Tuesday rolls around and I still have not heard from them, so I give them a call. We have another small problem apparently. They were shipped the wrong sizes. Kind of curious why they didn't call me and let me know the wheels were in but there's a problem, instead I have to call to find out what's going on. I get pretty pissed at this point as we are closing in on a month since I gave them my deposit and walked in their store with the exact sizes I wanted, they didn't have to do anything except place the order because I had done my research.
Wednesday morning I drove to their shop to retrieve my deposit. Surprise surprise they didn't open on time, what kind of shop do you run here? As the owner is counting back my cash he says "oh no wonder we didn't get the right size, our invoice is wrong" , gee so was your estimate dumbass. WTF! My reciept was right because I double checked it before I left their shop and looked it over numerous times to make sure everything was correct. Would you admit that to your customer at this point? You look like an idiot.
Then the owner claims that he's now stuck with those wheels since they were a special order, I don't buy that for a second or why were you so confident that you'd make it right if they didn't fit. AND if it happens to be true that he IS in fact stuck with those wheels wouldn't that give them even more reason to measure in the first place to make sure they'll fit before placing the order?
Now I'm back to square one and since I've had so much time to think, I'm debating if I want to stick with that style wheel or go a different route now and also questioning width and offset again. Very frustrating.
After I got my money back I went over to discount tire because I know they sell the wheel I was interested in. After chatting with the guy at discount tire things got more complicated. My car has had a 5x4.75 hub conversion done on it, I guess to make it easier to do the Corvette brake upgrade, not real sure what the previous owners motivation behind it was. But there is not a whole lot of wheel selection in the 5x4.75 pattern. My car is currently running BMW wheels which are 5x120mm. I tell the sales guy about the hub conversion and what wheels are on the car now and he proceeds to tell me that legally they cannot mount 5x120 wheels on my car if I were to order them. And I'm more than welcome to do it myself but if I buy them I own them. That was kind of my whole motivation for going to a shop was that if they don't fit it's on them. So just to clarify I told the guy that if I just wanted to replace the tires on my car and put the same wheels back on it they would refuse to service it and he said that was correct.
Now I know that 4.75 and 120mm aren't equal but there's no way he would have been able to tell unless I told him. And I don't know how unsafe it is, it seems from what I've read that s10 and blazer guys have been running them forever with no issues. After all the difference is 0.65mm's. So I'm not sure what I should do at this point.
[This message has been edited by zmcdonal (edited 06-14-2015).]