I just wanted to post my story for others to benefit from the pain I have had to endure. I bought a set of wheels from Boyd Coddington for a street rod project I am working on.

I chose the wheels initially because I liked the look, and so I bought a set for my car. After recieving the wheels, all 4 of them had what I would consider an unacceptable amount of weld splatter and polishing compound on the seam of the wheel where the centers are welded to the barrels. It was so much in fact, that you could see all this gunk from the front side of the wheel. After talking to them about it, its "by design" and thats as good as they polish it before they send it out to customers, so I was left to deal with it myself. Great I thought, and pressed on.

After getting them and mounting tires on them, I could tell on the balancing stand that there were some serious issues with the rear wheels. The fronts had been fine and required less than .25 oz of weight per wheel with the tire on. Not only were there several visual defects in the barrel of one of the rears , both rears exibited a visual out of round condition while spinning on the balancer (causing the wheel to appear to rise and fall at the rim lip while spinning).

Both rear wheels took in excess of 4 ounces of weight to true up with the tire. It was so much in fact, we could not conceal all of the lead behind the spokes just to keep the wheel looking good.

Floored by all of this this, I e-mailed Coddington Wheels with all of this and got to Chris Coddington who said he would be interested in addressing my concerns. Delighted by this, I sent them back and waited for thier return (even paid for the shipping out of my own pocket).

When they showed back up, the visual defects were removed, but the structural problems remained...

I sent mail back to Chris, and talked to him by phone this time around. He said he had gone back and looked at the paperwork from the re-work that had been done and that both of the rear wheels were within his allowable specs for "runout" (the measurement indicating the roundness of the wheel. The lower the number, the more round the wheel is.) He indicated that the max acceptable amount of runout for them was .040. On the advice of the rod shop that I ordered the wheels from after telling them my saga, I called all of the other billet wheel suppliers in the hobby to see what thier tolerances were and what they personally considered acceptable runout values for customer's wheels were. I called:

Billet Specialties
Colorado Custom
Intro Wheels
Budnik

Nearly all of them stated they considered 0.015 to be the maximum acceptable limit with one of them (I cannot remember which) indicating that .020 was the max tolerance for them on runout. I was also told by nearly all of them that .030 is the industry standard for for aluminum wheels, and that .040 was the industry standard for steel (stamped) wheels. Since Billet wheels can be so closely controlled in the manufacturing process, this is why all of them shoot for way below the standard limit.

So, I called Chris back, and explained this to him. He stated he felt like the discrepency between his data as measured from the first return of the wheels and what I was seeing was due to an out of adjustment balancing machine at the tire store I was visiting. I explained that I would take the wheels to another tire store in my area and have them checked, knowing that there was another location that was less than 6 months old in the city over from me.

I had a new shop measure the wheels, and there was some change in the values, but the net result was still that the wheels showed in excess of .030 of runout (enough to be a visible deformity in the wheels to my eye watching the wheels spin) and that even WITHOUT tires, the wheels required over 1.5 ounces of weight to make them true. I explained all this to Chris again, and he offered to personally inspect the wheels, and his story changed, in that his NEW tolerance for runout was now .030...

So I sent the wheels back out... again... and waited again...

At this point I could tell that Chris was getting tired of hearing from me (Exactly what you want when your trying to get your 3k worth of wheels to actually be "round"). A week and a half went by with no response. I e-mail Chris to find out if the wheels showed up, and I get a response they had and he had looked at them the Friday before (This is on Tuesday I hear this) and he is busy and will call me in an hour.

5 hours roll by... fed up and tired of getting blown off and run around, I call him... Only to hear him once again say he considers them "within spec" and as far as he is concerned, there is no issue with the wheels.

The best quote out of the whole ordeal, which I heard several times from Chris was "I don't have an issue with wheels having these problems..." He says this to me in spite of the mountain of evidence to the contrary (As if saying there is no problem will somehow WILL it to be true) Finally, I had to agree to disagree with him and will be just returning the damn things to them and paying a hefty restocking fee (Thanks guys for the great treatment and service!).

So the short of the story is, if you want nice looking wheels, get you some Boyds. If you want them to actually be round like a wheel is supposed to be, don't give them your hard earned money!