Almost 7 months ago to the day
I started a feeler thread to see if there would be enough interest to get Rota to develop a set of wheels for our stupid, uncommon 6x115mm bolt pattern. With a good deal of help from Dan @ Wheeldude.com, who went out on a limb and ordered a few sets of wheels "out of pocket," we managed to get the first set of Rota Torques ordered.
As Dan updated recently in
the wheel order thread, Rota is completing production of those first sets of wheels. I had been hoping that the wheels would be ordered while I was at sea from November - January, and thus would be done while I was home for February and March, but in the end that didn't work out. So, with my next underway rapidly approaching, it was beginning to look like I wasn't going to see the fruits of my labors until I get back home again in August!
That just wouldn't do, so I asked Dan if it was possible to drop-ship me the first set of wheels straight from the PI so I could get them before I went underway. Sho' nuff, it was (hey, it's only $$$, right?
), and they showed up here on Monday.
Due to a horribly busy work schedule this week, as my boat's crew worked on its final certification for deployment, I knew getting the wheels on the car was going to be tough. I had been planning on having this weekend to play with, but then the Air Farce stepped in and ruined that plan by scheduling the crew's flight to Guam a few days earlier than we had expected. Doh!
So, on Wednesday I "escaped" from the certification for a bit, loaded up the car with the wheels and the close-out RE01Rs I bought a few weeks back, and dropped everything off at Discount Tire to be mounted and balanced. If all goes according to plan, after we muster the crew early tomorrow afternoon I'll zip back to Discount Tire, install the wheels, and then get some pics before I lose the sunlight.
In the meantime, here are the first pics I took. My first impression was that the Hyper Black is darker than I expected. I've read elsewhere that the color changes appearance quite a bit depending on the lighting, and this being Western WA in March
, when I opened the boxes it was heavy overcast. Tomorrow afternoon is supposed to be sunny, so I'll try to get some pics in direct sunlight to contrast. Even in the pictures you can see how much of a difference it makes how the flash hits the wheel surfaces.
Here you can see one of the wheels with the P45 center cap (which is raised to clear the rear axle stubs) installed.
I had Dan send me a couple of spare flat center caps, too, thinking that I can use those in the front where there's no axle stubs to worry about.
And here are a few shots to show that the factory TPMS sensors mounted up just fine.
One thing I realized is that the silver valve stem/nut deal on the TPMS sensors would stand out against the dark colored wheels. I had some charcoal metallic Duplicolor paint in the garage, so I used some of that to paint the nuts. It's not perfect (just torquing the nuts in place caused some to wear off the flats of the nuts), but not too bad.
Based on my bathroom scale (using the (me + item) - (me alone) = weight of item technique) the wheels weigh right about the same as the GM Accessory wheels at 22-23#. That's a couple/few pounds less than what the stock wheels weigh, so that's pretty nice.
More pictures to follow (hopefully) tomorrow!
damn that color is PERFECT..Exactly what i was looking for... 
so am i really going to have to wait until the end of April to get my wheels???? whack!!
only a couple more weeks
and im sure if they look that good there will be another batch in a worst case senario
