Diamond Cut Wheel Repair in Rochdale

More often than anywhere else except Bury and Manchester. Twenty minutes of travel means a technician can take a late booking without wrecking the rest of the day, so if you call in the morning with photos already sent, there is a fair chance of an afternoon slot the same day.

The practical limits are weather and space rather than distance. We need somewhere the car can stand for a few hours, room to work around it and dry conditions for the lacquer to cure. A driveway or a private yard is ideal, and a garage makes winter bookings much easier to keep.

• OL11 and OL16 across Rochdale town centre
• OL12 to the north of the town
• OL15 out towards Littleborough
• Heywood and Middleton on the A58 run
• Bury and Oldham jobs grouped onto the same day

The ones that have run out of material. Each pass on the lathe removes a fine layer of aluminium from the face, so a wheel that has been machined two or three times already, or one where corrosion has pitted deep into the metal, reaches the point where cutting again is not sensible. We will say so before we start rather than take the job and hope.

Powder coating is not a downgrade in every respect. It puts a harder wearing finish on the wheel than the original thin lacquer, which suits cars that spend winters on gritted Pennine roads, and it can be matched across a full set so all four look the same. It does lose the bright turned face, and that is the trade off to weigh up.

• Faces already machined several times
• Deep pitting from salt and standing water
• Lacquer peeling away across the whole face
• Sets where three wheels have weathered differently

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.

Rochdale is a straight run up the A58 from Radcliffe, about 20 minutes, which makes it one of the towns we can usually cover at short notice. Heywood and Middleton sit on the same road, so they are frequently booked on the same day.

We work throughout Rochdale and the OL11, OL12, OL15, OL16 postcode areas, typically 20 minutes from the body shop at Radcliffe, M26 4AD. That includes Rochdale town centre, Heywood, Middleton and Littleborough.