Wheel repair- possible side business??

Hi Guys- I am wondering if anyone has any insight or experience into what it would take to start up a wheel repair business. Would it be as straight forward as just purchasing the correct equipment? It seems like fixing bends or bent wheels is a different animal compared to the refinishing. I am curious how feasible this might be to start up on the side. Thanks in advance for your two cents worth!

I ran into the wheel repair guy at the BMW dealership in Watertown a few weeks ago. He had a mobile setup inside a van. It looked pretty expensive. I didn't get a chance to talk to him as he was on the phone with a client the whole time and I was just passing by. It might have been part of Dent Wizard.

Steel wheel repair is easy. Alloy, you need a tig welder and a CNC lathe, and a paint booth if you are going to do it seriously.

...And liability insurance. Lots of it.

There is a guy here in Branford that does aluminum wheel repair. He has made a business out of it for ten years at least. He does both the bend/crack fixing and the refinishing though. He pulls business from various shops even large sized dealers.

I've watched him do a crack repair and it seems relatively straightforward assuming you have the equipment. He basically just welded the thing up with a really solid weld, ground it down a little and then had a mount where he could true up the rim via heating and bending. I say this having no practical experience doing any of it. He obviously also had a tire mount and balance setup as well.

Every repair I've had from him has been fine for the life of the vehicle with me. The crack repair was well over 50k miles when I sold the car.

The ones I see operate as a franchise. That means that there is money to be made, but seldom for the guy doing the actual work.

Lots of information on Youtube or the net if you want to look into it.

As a guy doing a bit of garage work with little overhead (ie no equipment) you are really into polishing and powder coating. Time intensive tedious work and you need to come in around 50% of the cost of a new rim.

There's a shop near me that has apparently been doing it for decades. They also do alignments and other work.

Then there is magnesium and carbon fiber...

I see it being super expensive to get into...

I see business for this come and go all the time. My guess, not a viable business.

I have a friend that does it in Tampa. He only does it for dealerships and shops. It pays his bills ok I guess. He gave up on doing it for the general public, as people can be berkeleynuts.

Raze wrote: Then there is magnesium and carbon fiber...

Race teams don't fix them, they replace them.

All serious race teams know wheels are considered a consumable like tires/brakes, etc.

Just was quoted $125 to fix curb rash on an alloy rim. Included powder coating. The place I went to also is a weld shop specializing in tough jobs like iron heads and blocks. Seems they do a lot of things to make it work.

The ones around here are fixed locations and have arrangements with the various shops and dealerships to do the wheel repairs. They have consolidated to just a few and of moderate size. Don't know about insurance work. I haven't seen a mobile operation in years. Only one semi-little non-franchise type left that I am aware of.

Getting customers seems to me to be the hardest part of the equation.

I don't have much to add about the wheel repair, but if you can expand beyond wheel repair you may be able to fill in some of the gaps.

For example, the guy I used to use for repairs on boat props also did wheel repair.

He would repair aluminum and stainless props, repair/replace skegs on lower units, and weld up aluminum boats and lower units. The rocks in the area lakes kept him busy during the summer, and the snow and ice kept him busy over the winter.

In reply to Woody:

Must have gotten a new guy in that area. I gave up waiting for the guy scheduled to repair the rims on my Volvo. In 2010.

Id be a bit wary of being on the litigat-ical hook for welding/powdercoating alloy wheels that go back into the wild. Extreme temp cycling does weeeiiiirrd things to heat treated Aluminum... I could imagine things like that could end spectacularly at freeway speeds and beyond.

...could