Having diamond cut alloys can make a lot of financial sense as well as making your car look good.
These ultra-shiny wheels are fast becoming popular with drivers who enjoy their cars and have been described as being to the alloy wheel what the alloy is to a plain old fashioned steel rim, the next step in wheel couture if you like.
A diamond cut finish has a much shinier and glossier look than a standard alloy and if you put them side by side the difference is immediately clear. The diamond wheellooks highly polished, almost mirror-like and much more reflective.
These days you can find them on most of the more upmarket brands and they’re beginning to filter down to mid-market makes too where they add a lot to the showroom appeal.
They are available as original fit equipment when the car is being built at the factory or you can have your existing alloy given a new finish and quite apart from the aesthetic value there is also a strong economic reason why having a diamond cut look makes sense.
If you take an alloy on a big SUV for example, you can easily be looking at perhaps £800 a wheel and if you damage or kerb them that little knock then becomes very expensive. But it can be repaired with a diamond cut finish for around £100 on a wheel repair machine, so you end with something that looks great and is definitely a whole lot cheaper than buying a new one.
There are several stages in getting a diamond cut finish. The wheel is dipped in an acid bath to strip the wheel back to the bare alloy, putting it on a diamond cutting wheel repair lathewhere a very fine layer is machined off the face of the rim and the top layer of the spokes, leaving an ultra-shiny surface.
If you look carefully you should be able to see tiny little grooves, almost like those on the back of a CD. A lacquer is then applied to this newly revealed surface and if you have a different base colour on the rest of the wheel the result can be spectacular.
And despite what you may read or hear elsewhere, they are no more prone to corrosion than any other wheel.
One final point to make-because of the equipment and processes needed, refurbishing diamond cut alloys is not something that can be done by a mobile alloy wheel refurbishment.
The alloy wheel can only be repaired at a car body shopwhich has made the investment in the technology and training to take what was a lightly damaged wheel and turn it into something that makes your car look great saving you several hundred pounds in the process.
