Bent or Buckled Wheels

Damaged rims are more than an embarrassing blemish on your vehicle’s appearance. A bent rim can be quite dangerous to drive on, can lead to causing further damage to your wheel and ultimately ruin your tyres or throw out alignment, creating a potential safety danger.

Buckles and small bents are not always visible. If you have hit a pothole, here are a couple of ways to figure out if your wheel has been bent or cracked:

• It can get uncomfortable to drive because the car will be shaking
• If you feel the shake in the steering it’s usually the front wheel
• If you feel the shake in the seat it’s usually the rear wheel
• Your tyres keep losing pressure

If a wheel is left buckled it very likely will crack. It starts off as a buckle and with the constant fatigue of the wheel on the road, it will crack in the end.

If the crack goes straight across the spoke, then there is nothing to be done and the wheel is essentially scrap metal. That is because for wheels to fail through the spoke that is usually due to enormous overload or very bad manufacturing.

Inexpensive counterfeit wheels are inexpensive because the manufacturing standards are low compared with factory wheels. More than 500,000 wheels are imported from China each year, but none are tested to see if they meet Australian Design Rules, and the regulations are not enforced.

Experts say most cheap or counterfeit wheels from China are made from a blend of scrap alloy and raw material — but alloy wheels should be made solely from raw material to guarantee their strength.

FIXARIM as a responsible repairer will go to great lengths to fix a wheel, but there are limitations and we will make sure you are aware when your damaged wheel it’s better off being fixed or put aside.