Hi,
Seeing that my name was mentioned in this thread, I thought I should chime
on on the topic.
There are a lot of Minilite replica wheels out there: Superlite, K&S
(available from Moss), Panasport are a few. The K&S wheels are fairly
inexpensive and I strongly recommend buying them through a Moss reseller
as you WILL save some money on them. I _think_ the Moss rpelica Minilites
are K&S - if not, they're K&Somethingorother. :-) A lot of the Vintage
Triumph racers use the Moss Minilite replicas...
The general point of this post is that there are wheels out there for
resonable money. The problem that most TR6 owners have with this topic is
the thought of dishing out $600 or $800 for a set of rims is somehow "too
expensive". Let me try to add some perspective to this logic. If you're
car is shaking/vibrating because the wheels are out of round, how long do
you think you will go before you have probs? What if a wheel fails
catastrophically? Try to imagine your $5000 paint job getting mashed into
a guard rail... or an axle coming loose while you're driving at freeway
speeds.
If you don't like the look of the Minilite replicas, your job of replacing
your wheels becomes quite difficult owing to issues with backspacing and
the 4 on 4.5" bolt pattern. Yes you can substitute other wheels that are
more vintage, but in many cases you have the same issues that you have
with old stock TR6 rims - they are dented, out of round, etc. Not to
mention incomplete sets! I had a set of 3 ea. 4 spoke American Racing rims
for four years looking for the 4th rim. Was it worth the wait? Not really,
I still had to spend real money (more than $200) to get them cleaned up
and painted (and I did nearly all the work myself). To wit - I spent
nearly $500 for an old set of rims. WOW - if I'd applied real logic, I
would have been DRIVING THE CAR FOR 4 YEARS on the $800 Panasports.
Actually, Panasports were less than $800/set at that time ('90's).
You can also use adapters to get access to other bolt patterns, but then
you have probs with offset/back spacing.
But the bottom line is that new rims cost $800 (or whatever) because
that's what they are worth. If they weren't worth the money, then they'd
cost less... simple supply/demand.
Go figure.
rml
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