My worst tire changing experience
 

I'M HERE TO WARN EVERYONE TO STAY AWAY FROM GATEWAY TIRE next to the Malco Cinema on N Germantown Parkway. Yesterday i went to their store to get my new tires mounted 255/35/18 for the rears and the guy that worked on my car forgot his name cucasian male 5ft6-7in curbed my wheels INSANELY BAD and i just bought them brand new Varrstoen ES1 18X9.5 ill try to post pictures they were plastidipped all black including the lips but you can clearly see the chrome around the whole rims from where he curbed it i had 6 coats of black plastidip on the wheel and he curbed through all of it and the chrome. Anyways i didn't look at them until after work which got me very upset that my new wheels was HORRIBLY DAMAGED however today on my day off as i tried to take my tires off to inspect the damage and try to repair my wheels, i had a very hard time getting my lugnuts off with my breaker bar. The lugs are SR48 Extended Lugs and i took them off MULTIPLE TIMES before with little to no effort however this time only one or two came off easily the rest are glued to the studs and i finally determined that the guy who worked on my car used a high power impact gun to put my lugs on instead of hand tightening them then torqueing them down like the manual says to do which stripped almost all of my lugnuts. Right now my rear tires are stuck to my poor frs unless i break the lugs off with the studs which means ill have to replace all of the rear studs for my car and buy a new set of lugnuts as well. I'm going to go and file a complaint to them tomorrow after i get out class but right now 3-4 lugnuts are stripped on each wheel and i have no way to take them off ill let gateway handle it tomorrow. From now on i'm not trusting any local shops with my car and taking it to my friends shop that i know have a great reputation with customers even though its 20-30 mins away instead of crap shops like gateway that are next door. So be warned this is my warning and my experience with this tire store i'm going to update tomorrow on how my claim goes for my wheels, lugs, and studs i paid $600 just for the rear wheels thank God i didnt change out the front or i would be balling right now. This is my warning to everyon I don't want anyone to go through what i did especially on their brand new FR-S/BR-Z please be warned.

That sounds like a nightmare come true. Hopefully you get everything sorted out and some sort of money back from this garbage of a garage.

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How do you mount a tire on a plasti-dipped rim?

I can't say I've ever mounted a tire, but I've seen it done enough to think that it would be extremely difficult, if nearly impossible, to successfully mount a tire on a wheel without the machine stripping the plasti-dip all the way around the rim, making it appear "curbed".

I also doubt you will need to replace your studs. It's certainly possible, but just because you can't get them off byhand, doesn't mean the next step is to break the studs off. More likely the lugs were just put on way too tight. Chances are they can juse use the same air tool to knock them loose, and just hand-tighten them so you can get them off. Still not cool at all though. That's why I always keep a breaker bar in my cars -- you never know when you'll get a lug that's too tight or rusted on.

I'm really surprised these tire mounting places aren't more careful. Are they really not responsible for the damage? I'm sure most people wouldn't notice but still

This. If they were curbed, you would see some serious rash in the chrome. If just the plasti-dip is removed and you can see the original wheel finish then its just that the tire stripped away the plastidip as it was being mounted on the wheel.

Need less bold, my eyes exploded after reading :eyebulge:

I can sympathise with your situation. I only got a local shop to mount & balance my tires onto the wheel, thankfully with zero incident. I didn't trust any local shop to install my new wheels properly so I invested in a nice tengtool torque wrench (with calibration certificate from sweden!) and did the install myself. When you have high expectations of getting a job done properly, sometimes there really isn't anyone you can depend on except yourself.

Dude sorry about your lug nuts, but just pushing in / removing the old tire by itself is going to remove that flimsy plasti-dip near the edge, it's a removable product, not permanent.

This

Um i know he was going to strip the plastidip off i was hoping for that the plastidip was there to protect the actual lip but he curbed through all 6 coats of plastidip AND the actual chrome lip itself thats what piss me off cause they were brand new not even a month old and now they look like crap. I used a breaker bar and was able to rotate all the bolts but the ones that were stripped got harder and harder to turn and eventually stop spinning at all. :(

There is deep rashes in the chrome almost all the way around the rims, the right rims has ugly rashes all around but the left is not as bad but still very noticeable.

:needpics: