An Evaluation of Double-Drilled Aftermarket Car Wheels
Something to avoid, and one vendor to avoid in particular
August, 2019
About six months ago I went looking for an extra set of wheels for our Subaru Forester to mount our snow tires on. I wanted some utilitarian wheels that "looked ok," but I wasn't looking for anything fancy. After all, these were for snow tires, we live on a dirt road miles from the city, and the car would be dirty most of the time. I wanted wheels that would hold up, and that's about it.
After some searching on the web, I bought some wheels from CARiD. Fortunately for me, when the wheels arrived there was a sticker saying something to the effect of "You cannot return these wheels if they have had tires mounted on them." So I opened one of the packages, took a wheel out, and took it out to my car to mount it.
The wheels I bought were double-drilled. That is, there were two sets of holes in the wheels, each set of five holes at a slightly different radius from the center. The wheel manufacturers make some wheels this way so they can sell the same wheel on a wider assortment of cars.
The wheels came with a "free mounting kit" which contained valves, hub spacers, and a set of fancy chrome lug nuts and a special lug nut tool. The hub spacers are to allow the wheel, which has an oversized hole in the center, to fit snugly against the hub of the car axle if that axle is smaller than the center hole on the wheel. The mounting kit, when described in the on-line ad, was listed under "options", after another option — a full set of tires, which I obviously didn't need.
I am not interested in spiffing up my wheels, so I didn't worry about the fancy lug nuts. I went out to my car, jacked up a wheel, took the old wheel off, inserted the hub spacer in the new wheel, put the new wheel on, and went to tighten the lug nuts. I started the first lug nut, grabbed my ratchet with socket that I used to remove the old wheel, and went to tighten the nut. Surprise! The socket would not fit in the hole for the lug nut!
Huh? Upon inspecting the wheel closer, the problem is apparent. There is not a lot of metal near the center of a wheel where the studs for mounting the wheel poke through the holes. In order to fit two different sets of mounting holes on a wheel and still leave some amount of metal to hold the wheel together, one or both sets of holes has to have less room around it for the lug nuts. For these wheels, one set was full-sized and another was under-sized. The under-sized holes were the ones on the radius which fit my vehicle. In order to have a lug nut you can tighten, the wheel manufacturer has to make special lug nuts which require a special wrench that fits in that smaller hole — a standard tire-iron or standard socket will not fit in the hole.
In the images of the double-drilled wheel below, notice how in the under-sized hole the tools cannot reach into the hole far enough to engage the standard wheel lug-nut; instead, the tool only goes down to where it rides on the rim of the hole.
OEM Wheel with tire wrench
fully seated in hole
OEM Wheel with Socket
fully seated in hole
(the socket is longer than the OEM tire tool
so it sticks out further)
Double-drilled Wheel
Tire wrench in full-sized hole
Fully seated
(Note flat rim on adjacent undersized holes)
Double-drilled Wheel
Tire wrench in undersized hole
Riding on rim of hole
Double-drilled Wheel
Socket in full-sized hole
Fully seated
(Note flat rim on adjacent undersized holes)
Double-drilled Wheel
Socket in under-sized hole
Riding on rim of hole
I decided I didn't want these wheels for several reasons:
- First, I wanted to be able to use standard tools to change a tire; either the regular tire-changing tool which came with my car, or a standard socket. That way passing motorists could help me if I lost my tools for some reason. I've dropped things in the snow in the past, and they can be incredibly difficult to find in the middle of a blizzard, and even on a nice day. If I ever lost that special lug wrench, or those special nuts...
- Second, I wanted a wheel that was tough. If you look at the above photos of a double-drilled wheel, you will see there is not a lot of metal left going around the wheel where the holes are drilled. I've read about wheels breaking, and always wondered how that was even possible. How does normal driving put enough force on a wheel to break it??? But if you think about it, bouncing around on dirt roads can put a lot of repetitive strain on a wheel, and a double-drilled wheel is much more likely to fatigue and break than one with only one set of holes.
So I sent CARiD a note asking for a return authorization, saying I wanted to return the wheels. They were extremely obnoxious, claiming the wheels were fine and refusing to accept them back unless I paid the return freight and they charged me a 10% restocking fee. I refused on the basis that their ads said these wheels were guaranteed to "fit your vehicle perfectly" and that I had already paid shipping one way. We had a weeks-long back and forth, complete with pictures, but they still refused. I finally contested the charge on my credit card. The bank asked me for documentation and eventually agreed with me, tentatively. The vendor then made additional attempts to get me to take the wheels, raising no new issues. Finally, after three or four months, the bank agreed with me and the vendor sent me shipping instructions to return the wheels. The vendor has since modified their on-line ad slightly, but it is still deceiving.
In short, I would strongly recommend not buying any kind of double-drilled wheel, and I would very, very, very strongly recommend NOT buying anything from CARiD.