New Tires

I finally got around to getting new tires for the Civic. I used Sam’s Club, which had relatively inexpensive tires and installation charges, and wound up with Goodyear Regatta 2 tires, as these seemed to be most appropriate, given what Sam’s Club had in stock for this car. Everything is running much more smoothly now: the semi-polygonal tire (distorted from running for a while with bad alignment) is gone, and there’s no longer a big vibration coming up through the steering wheel.

Sam’s Club service isn’t bad, though I got stuck behind five people in the queue and spent more than 90 minutes wandering through the warehouse store after I signed in. The tire replacement itself was $9/tire, and took well under an hour. The mechanic, when signing me off, told me that they will do a free rebalance after 7000 miles. Current mileage is around 67K miles, so more or less 2 oil changes from now.

The mechanic did find that the driver’s side rear wheel was a little bent, though not severely. It just has to be take care of. A new steel wheel for this car is $30 + about $11 shipping from tirerack.com. Note that the tirerack.com website will take you to all sorts of expensive bling-bling wheels if you just go to the “wheels” selection in the Products menu. You have to go to “winter” products, then “build” your own winter wheel package to be able to find plain steel wheels. I’ll have to see how much the Honda dealership charges (the nearest one is across the street from the Toyota from which we’re buying a new Matrix XR, which will hopefully be in next week), but there’s no big rush, and after I have it, I can pop over to Sam’s Club again and have them put it in and balance it for $9.

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