Diamond Cut Wheel Repair in Leeds

As a planned day, usually shared with Bradford or Halifax on the same side of the Pennines. Booking three or four days ahead is realistic and gets you a choice of times. Ringing on the morning hoping for an afternoon slot in Leeds is the one thing this distance rules out, which is worth knowing before your lease inspection date arrives.

The alternative is a workshop collection. Wheels that need stripping to bare metal, an oven cured powder coat base or the tyre off the rim come back to Radcliffe, and collection and delivery on those jobs is free. For a set that is too far gone for a mobile re-cut, that often works out simpler than trying to arrange a long on site visit.

• LS1 and LS2 across Leeds city centre
• LS6 for Headingley and the university side
• LS8 for Roundhay
• LS11 south of the river
• LS16, LS17 and LS18 for Horsforth and the northern suburbs
• Free collection and delivery on workshop jobs

Multi storey car parks, mostly. Ramps in older decks were designed for narrower cars, and the turn radius forces the nearside wheel towards a raised edge at exactly the speed where you feel it but cannot avoid it. One circuit of a tight spiral ramp can scuff a face right around its circumference, which on a diamond cut wheel means the whole face needs re-cutting rather than one patch repairing.

On street parking adds the rest. Modern rim diameters leave almost no tyre sidewall standing proud, so the machined face meets the kerb directly. Caught quickly that is a shallow, clean scuff and an ideal candidate for the lathe. Left for a winter, water gets under the broken lacquer, corrosion spreads sideways and the repair becomes a good deal more involved.

A diamond cut alloy wheel is one where the face has been machined on a lathe to expose polished aluminium, then sealed with clear lacquer. The rest of the wheel, usually the pockets between the spokes and often the inner barrel, is painted in a colour such as anthracite, gunmetal or gloss black, which gives the two tone look of a bright face against a dark background.

The finish is common on modern and higher specification cars, and there are a lot of variations. Some wheels are cut across the full face, some only to the outer half of the spoke, and the pitch of the machining differs between manufacturers. That is why the repair needs a lathe and a technician who has cut that style of wheel before, rather than a spray gun and a good eye.

The trade off is durability. Nothing sits between the lacquer and the metal, so stone chips, weathering and winter road salt take a diamond cut wheel apart far faster than they would a standard painted alloy.

Leeds is the furthest city we visit regularly, forty five miles from the Radcliffe body shop over the M62, so work here is booked as full mobile days or as workshop collections. Bradford and Halifax are often covered on the same route.

We work throughout Leeds and the LS1, LS2, LS6, LS8 postcode areas, typically 60 minutes from the body shop at Radcliffe, M26 4AD. That includes Leeds city centre, Headingley, Roundhay and Horsforth.