Having bent and damaged rims can mean compromising your fuel efficiency, and the safety of your vehicle. Fortunately, rim straightening can fix rims that have been frequently introduced to curbs or other immovable objects. If you need to restore your rims, then you have three options.
- Buy new wheels.
- Do it yourself.
- Call a professional.
Buying new wheels might seem like the simplest solution, but it’s not the most affordable, so let’s compare the remaining two options.
You could try a little DIY.
To straighten your rims, you will need a way to figure out how to center your wheel, so that you can pinpoint the part of the rim that needs to be straightened. Then you will need a homemade contraption, perhaps using a scissor jack and a vice, to hold the wheel in place and to push the rim from the inside out, correcting the bend. Then, you will need to heat up the rim with a blowtorch, and crank the jack to slowly push the rim back to where it should be.
Unfortunately, this type of DIY rim straightening is risky for the following reasons:
- When done without a blow torch, the structure of the rim can become brittle and prone to breaking.
- Homemade contraptions are subject to failing.
- Hand cranking a jack is imprecise, and without a proper setup, can result in further misshaping of the rim.
- Blow torch. Enough said.
You could leave it all to the professionals.
Professionals will mount the wheel on a sophisticated balancing machine to determine the extent to which the rim will need straightening. Then, the wheel is mounted onto another machine, where a gauge is used to read the wheel, and a trained professional will mark where the wheel needs to come in, and where it needs to get pushed out. Rim mounting and balancing is then performed with the aid of a blow torch and a hydraulic system. After the gauge shows that the rim is straightened, a road force balancer is used to compare the dimensions of the wheel to factory standard.
Rim straightening done by a professional clearly comes with several advantages. The first being that professionals will be able to carry out any other rim repair or rim refinishing that is necessary to restore the appearance of your rims. The second advantage being that, should you choose a good company, then you need not worry about ending up with a wheel that is worse off than when it started.
You can find rim straightening at autobody repair shops, or as standalone services. While there are many people who can successfully straighten rims in their own garages, the risks to their own personal safety and the stability of the wheel are considerable. It is a safer and smarter option to call an experienced professional who has the tools to correctly perform the job. Learn more at this link.