Following in the footsteps of
Rob with his thread showing the GM Accessory wheels on his Thunder Grey car, here are a few pics of my new wheels on my Stealth Grey car.
The tires are 245/45-18 Falken FK452s, which I've never tried before, but generally they get very positive reviews and the price is pretty damn good. The wheels, center caps, and TPMS sensors all came from Luke @ Lindsay Cadillac, while the tires were sourced from Discount Tire Direct. (I'm normally a Tire Rack kinda guy, but they don't carry Falken stuff, soooo....)
My initial impression was that the wheel/tire combo didn't look as aggressive as the Mille Miglias and Dunlop Wintersports that came off the car. (Yes, I bought the car used with winter tires on it in August.) It's somewhat of an optical illusion. I measured both sets of tires mounted on the wheels and the 245 FK452s came in at 10", while the Dunlop 245s were 9-3/4". The fact that the snow tires are mounted on 1/2" narrower wheels makes them look like they're wider than the FK452s since they've got a little more bulge to the sidewalls. Add to that the fact that the MM wheels have a +35mm offset (vice the OEM +42mm) and the combination just looks a bit more beefy in the wheels wells.
Using my trusty bathroom scale (and the "(me + object) - (me alone) = weight of object" technique to weigh things), the GM Accessory wheels weigh in at ~23# each. The GM wheel + FK452 combo was 5-6# lighter than the MM + run-flat winter tire combo.
I do have one gripe about the wheels - the polished finish. If you're really anal about detailing on your car, you probably wouldn't want these wheels, as the polishing detail isn't that great. It's not something you would notice from more than a couple/few feet away, so I personally am not going to lose any sleep over it from an aesthetic perspective. However, I am a little surprised and annoyed that wheels that list at over $400 each and only come with a polished finish aren't even polished that well! The face of the wheel is nice and shiny, but when you wash the wheels you can see the swirls in the aluminum beneath the clearcoat. Some of the swirls are pretty pronounced. As you go in between the spokes the polishing gets downright crappy - it's pretty clear that they focus on polishing the face of the spokes, and the sides of the spokes don't receive as much attention. The spokes are an inch or so deep, and as you go across that inch from front to back you can see the polished finish actually gets cloudy because they didn't polish the spokes all the way to the back edge. I honestly wondered if the first one I looked at was just a bad one, but the other 3 turned out to be the same as I pulled them from their boxes.
|510RWHP/560TQ|383ci|MP 112-7psi/90TB|AFR 225|Cam|B&B Exhst&Hdrs&X|KARS III|Mez WP|Spec3+|Hotchkis sways|MSDs|CCW BC SP600s|PS2 295r|UUC shftr&knob|EC Cowl Hood|162mph 1-mile run
