Gary,
The main reasons I didn't confront the vendor are:
1)that I am not the first owner or even the second owner of these wheels.
The wheels were put on the car when it was restored by an owner in 1998. I
bought it in 1999 from the guy who bought it from the restorer. So when
discussing liability, I had no proof the wheels weren't abused by the
previous 2 owners and I expect any warranty would only be to the original
purchaser.
2)I don't know which vendor sold the wheels that broke. But I have told Moss
my story.
3)Plus the problem sort of snowballed so I had no idea at the beginning that
paying $1200 to buy 4 new Daytons would have been the thing to do rather
than paying $150 for respoking that first wheel in 2000. Hind sight is as
they say is always 20-20.
4)New wheels (Daytons) cost about twice as much as respoking so ...
5)And I was told and had read that Daytons were visibly different so I
hesitated initially to mix and match.
Anyway, because you asked the list, I wanted to relay how the chrome Dunlop
experience has been a sour one for me.
I read all the responses to the question. It seems a lot of the folks kept
using their wheels after one or two spokes broke. One guy even said he had
25 spokes broken on one wheel. I was always afraid of a catastrophic domino
effect so I sent a wheel for rebuilding as soon as I noticed a single broken
spoke.
I hope for Moss, Victoria British, myself and all others who have recently
bought chrome Dunlops, that the spoke quality really has improved as they
are saying it has.
-Thanks for asking!
Dave Murphy
>From: Editorgary@aol.com
>To: roadwarriordave@hotmail.com, healeys@autox.team.net
>Subject: Re: Complaint about spokes breaking
>Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 00:29:23 EDT
>
>
>In a message dated 6/8/05 7:34:24 PM, roadwarriordave@hotmail.com writes:
>
>
> > Plus I have two other gripes with the Dunlops -
> >
>
>With all the problems you've had with these wheels, I have to ask why
>you've
>never discussed these problems with the original vendor, and why you didn't
>just buy new Dayton wheels if you were going to go to the trouble and
>expense of
>having Dayton rebuild the Dunlop wheels? Seems to me that the original
>vendor
>would have some sort of warranty on the wheels, and would also seem that
>given the cost of respoking a wheel, it would have paid to simply have
>switched to
>a Dayton wheel when the spokes started to break.
>I should also point out that for the most part, it sounds as if you're
>trying
>to fix wheels that are more than five years old, and may be much older than
>that.
>One thing Kelvin Dodds of Moss told me was that there had been problems in
>the distant past with the MSW Dunlop wheels, but that in more recent years
>the
>product has improved substantially, and that Moss does give a warranty on
>the
>new Dunlop wheels it sells.
>Cheers
>Gary
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