I'm going to have to replace the tires on my car, and I'd like to upgrade
>from the painted gray 15 hole 15" factory wheels. The car is black, and I'm
>thinking chrome will be perfect for this.
>
>My question is that I'm wondering about 'plus sizing' when I do this. going
>from the 15" X 7" wheel to a 16" X 7.5" wheel. Anybody done this with these
>full size W126's?
235/55-16 is as big as you can go. Any smaller size tire will wotk as long as the diametr is within 2%. Use this:
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The big tire retailers in this part of the country are NTB and Discount
>Tire. Discount has services to ride match the wheel and the tire together.
>They may even 'true' the tire for a perfectly rounded tire. (hope so,
>anyway). Unfortunately, I don't think they have the type of wheel I want.
>Tire Rack seems to have nice inventory, but I don't know if they have the
>higher end services I want for the tire/wheel combo.
>
>Where is a good place to get some M-B chrome wheels for these cars?
I think chrome looks tack and pimped out and prefer alloys (which are painted silver as aluminum oxidizes) but that's just me.
Tire Rack is what I'd use and jim at tirerack.com is very very helpful.
They won't do any less for you than anybody else will, nowm when it comes to balancing I'm not a big fan of off-car balance; if you want it to be as smooth as glass get them balanced on the car. Not many places can do this but it makes a difference.
You need perfect alignment of you're wear the tires prematurely, these big heavy cars can be tough on tires if it's not dead on and I've had so many bad alignments (with the worn tires to prove it) from places that only doChevvies that it's worth finding a place that specifically does German cars. BMW's are even tricker to align than Mercedes, so find a place that does those (or ask he local BMW indie who they use) and take the car there.