Anti modern man.

Not had time to get a decent run at welding the austin and i got a bit fed up with scraping off underseal so my mind started to turn to the Pasta wagon. I finally got around to trying to find the reason for the engine warning light and accompanying error code as posted earlier. I poked about a bit and pulled an obviously sick vacuum hose from the engine. It had really gone a bit slack at both ends, i changed this (had some silicone hose of just the right diameter in stock, so to speak. See my ebay purchases really do come in handy) and then reset the warning light with my laptop again. The warning hasn't returned so far so, i'll just have to wait and see.

Time is coming for some new tyres soon too so my mind naturally started considering a possible change of wheel too. Now my, some would say, anti modern car tendencies led me to thinking about getting rid of the summer tyre alloys for something better. Everybody has alloy wheels these days so i decided to seek out and step back to steel wheels. Meh I hear you say.


Now finding wheels isn't as easy as you may think. they need to have the correct PCD, correct bolt hole size, offset, centre bore, width and of course diameter. (this is even limited to a certain range in the cars documents in Norway along with the allowed tyres sizes for the car. True.)

All cars over here are supplied with two sets of wheels, one for winter, usually steel, and one for summer, usually some fancy alloy. So there are plenty of people who ditch the winter steels and buy alloys (just because they look cooler, or so they think.)

Soooooo i had something in mind as you do and I am lucky in the fact that VAG incorporates Audi, VW and Skoda so they all have a few overlapping wheel fittings.
My ideal spec was 16"x7" with the correct PCD of 5x112, bolt hole 14mm, centre bore 57.1mm and offset of somewhere around 40.
I've been trawling the for sale ads in Oslo for ages without anything coming up until the other day and bingo a set of Audi A4 wheels with just the spec i wanted, without tyres... even better.
Only 15 mins away down the motorway too and i managed to agree a price of NOK 200,- per wheel. Happy with that.

Once safely tucked up in the workshop they were scrubbed clean and found to be near mint condition, bonus.

The next challenge was finding some hubcaps to fit, i'd been keeping half an eye out for these too recently but without any wheels to play with it seemed a bit premature. The search was also proving to be a bit fruitless nothing remotely ever turned up people just throw old chrome hub caps away. So imaging my utter delight when this turned up for sale on the net, and in Oslo too. Quite staggering really. NOK 100,- secured me 4 slightly grotty VW golf MkI hubcaps, Just to see if they fitted.

and voila.... hahahahahahaha, got to be happy with that. just need find some clips and find a way of sticking them to the wheel, so work to do but this may even look OK. Oh yeah i'm going to be needing some tyres too.
EDIT - by the magic of ebay i've think i've found clips too.