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Tires: A Story (Long)

To: Spridgets <spridgets@autox.team.net>
Subject: Tires: A Story (Long)
From: "J. Adrian Barnes" <adrian@icx.net>
Date: Wed, 17 Feb 1999 20:33:50 -0500
Reply-to: "J. Adrian Barnes" <adrian@icx.net>
Sender: owner-spridgets@autox.team.net
I got home tonight and who showed up but the UPS guy with three boxes of
Midget goodies for me.  He spent 5 minutes in my garage asking me
questions about the car, which was fine because he's bringing most of it
(the car) to me, one box at a time.  Among the loot were my new
Mini-lite replicas (Made in England, no less! heh heh).  Those are some
darn good looking wheels, by the way.

Anyway, impatient me opened them up, took one look, loaded them up in
the Accord and headed off to Sam's Wholesale, where I promptly had them
mount some Michelin 155/80 R-13's.  I spent the first 20 minutes telling
the two sales people (including a teenage girl, who was fascinated too)
all about the car and what I was doing, and by the time I came back to
pick the wheels up, a small crowd of employees had gathered around.  I
finally got to leave after spending another good 20 minutes telling my
story.  The main tire guy said half the store's employees had all made
it back there to take a look at the wheels.  I had to promise to bring
the car by when it was driveable.

All that commotion over some wheels!  heh heh...I can't wait to get the
car back on the road.  I may not have a running car yet, but at least I
got a little bit of excitement out of ownership tonight.

On an interesting technical note, the wheel/tire combination was almost
in perfect balance.  They said they didn't even have to balance one of
the wheels. Also, based on the balancing/mounting procedure, they marked
each wheel as to which position on the car they'd recommend placing it
(right front, and so on).

Now I have a stack of wheels in my garage waiting on something to hook
up to.  But, by golly, they sure look good.

One potential difficulty I ran into was that there was no car, and only
rims.  This could very easily cause problems with the manufacturer
warranty because they couldn't write down the starting mileage, and
since I don't yet have an odometer, I couldn't even guess.  On the other
hand, since I was going to buy the road hazard anyway, that covers the
tires to a particular tread depth, so I am okay anyway.  Just thought
you folks might be interested in that.

Oh well...time to clean house...have a hot date tomorrow!

adrian


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