Alloy Wheel Refurbishment in Trafford Park

That is a large part of what we do here. Rather than sending vehicles out one at a time, we come to the premises and work through them where they stand. A technician arrives with a fully equipped van, masks the tyres, and repairs each wheel in turn, typically two to four hours per wheel depending on how far the damage goes.

For businesses running vans, pool cars or lease vehicles, that matters at handback. Kerb damage on a returned lease car is one of the charges fleet operators see most often, and a repaired rim costs far less than the recharge. We can look at a group of vehicles, tell you which wheels genuinely need doing, and give one fixed quote across the lot.

• M17 for the industrial estate and surrounding units
• M32 and M41 for Old Trafford, Stretford and Urmston
• Vans, pool cars and lease vehicles repaired where they are parked
• Wheels refinished on the vehicle, so nothing goes off the road
• One fixed quote covering a group of vehicles
• Workshop collection at Radcliffe for full sets and colour changes

Manoeuvring in tight spaces, mostly. Loading bays, service yards and shared car parks are laid out for volume rather than for gentle wheel geometry, and reversing a van against a raised kerb takes the lip off a rim quickly. Concrete kerbs are also harsher than tarmac, so the damage tends to be a clean bite out of the edge rather than a smear.

The second pattern is motorway wear. Vehicles based on this side of Manchester spend their days on the M60 and the roads feeding it, picking up stone chips across the wheel face as well as the front of the car. Chips break the lacquer in dozens of small places at once, and on a salted winter road that is enough to start corrosion spreading under the finish.

The technician starts by cleaning the wheel and the damaged area so the true extent of the scuff, chip or corrosion is visible. What looks like a light scrape often turns out to have lifted lacquer around it, and that has to come off too or the repair will fail.

The tyre is then masked to protect it from sanding dust and overspray. Most repairs are carried out with the wheel still on the vehicle. The damaged area is sanded back to sound metal, and where the profile of the rim has been chipped away, filler is used to rebuild the edge before it is sanded flush and feathered into the surrounding finish.

Once the surface is flat and clean, the technician applies primer, then a colour matched basecoat mixed to the manufacturer paint code, then lacquer. Each coat is cured before the next goes on. Done properly, the repair is invisible: you should not be able to find where the damage was.

Trafford Park is twenty five minutes from the Radcliffe body shop, which makes daytime on site visits easy to schedule around a working shift. Most bookings here involve several vehicles at one address rather than a single car on a drive.

We work throughout Trafford Park and the M17, M32, M41 postcode areas, typically 25 minutes from the body shop at Radcliffe, M26 4AD. That includes Trafford Park industrial estate, the Trafford Centre, Old Trafford and Urmston.