- Man, when it comes to buying wheels,
it can be extremely hard
to narrow down what's best for you
with so many options out there.
You've got steel wheels, magnesium wheels,
alloy wheels, monoblock, rotary forged to ArtFormed,
two-piece, three-piece, fully forged.
And if you're not completely familiar with all of them,
sifting through them
and finding the wheel that's right for you can be
(inhales through teeth) a complete and utter nightmare.
What do all of these terms mean?
How does it affect the look, weight,
and the strength of the wheel?
How will it affect your vehicle
and how much will it hurt your wallet?
Well, luckily for you guys,
we're not just any old wheel supplier.
We are Fitment experts and we're here to help.
So sit back, relax, maybe take some notes,
because today we're gonna take a deep dive
into what makes these wheels
different from one another
and which one may be best for you.
Wow.
Now if you are looking for wheels, tires, or suspension,
let me hook you guys up.
If you head over to Fitment Industries right now
and put together a wheel and tire package,
we're gonna mount, balance, and ship these bad boys
to your door for free.
Or if you simply wanna learn more
about your favorite wheels
or see what looks good on your car,
we have the largest online gallery
of aftermarket wheels to ever exist.
And each one of these has all the wheel, tire,
and suspension information
to help you pick the perfect setup for your ride.
And if you like random automotive facts
and wanna see some behind-the-scenes action
here at Fitment Industries,
go give me a follow on the old Instagram @seanb.fi.
Let's get started (burps).
So first things first, steel wheels.
Steel wheels have been around for a long time
and are pretty much on all new passenger cars
and trucks from the factory,
and even in the aftermarket scene for a long time.
They're cheap to produce and strong hell.
Even a bunch of your more entry-level
and commercial wheels still use steel wheels to this day.
Now cheap and strong in this case does mean heavy.
These will not be the greatest choice for performance,
but they will reliably get you
form point A to point B
and will not likely cause any issues.
There are actually still companies
that make aftermarket steel wheels as well.
These are gonna be your Cagars and things like that.
A great choice if you're looking for that specific look
but not something I would necessarily recommend
for a performance-oriented platform.
You may also hear the term tossed around, alloy wheels.
Alloy wheel is simply a term
that refers to a wheel made up of a mixture of metal
and other elements.
They generally provide greater strength over pure metals,
which are usually much softer and much more ductile.
Alloys of aluminum or even magnesium
are typically lighter
for the same strength of a steel wheel,
while providing better heat conduction.
So an alloy wheel can either be magnesium or aluminum,
but pretty much is referring to aluminum wheels.
Aluminum alloy wheels are obviously made
of an aluminum alloy.
Since the late 1960s,
we've been able to produce an aluminum wheel
that's nearly as strong as steel,
but is significantly lighter.
But they are not all the same.
An aluminum wheel doesn't necessarily mean lightweight
just because it's lighter than steel.
In fact, there are multiple different ways
to create an aluminum alloy wheel
that are vastly different from each other.
And probably the most popular version of an aluminum wheel
is gonna be a cast aluminum wheel.
A cast aluminum wheel is made by casting aluminum
into a pre-made mold.
Aluminum is heated up until it becomes a liquid,
and it's poured into said mold,
and viola, you're 90% done with the process.
After the wheel is cast,
it goes through some machining steps
to make it a little bit less crude
and a little bit more precise,
as well as maybe even having some pieces
drilled out on the back side and things like that
to save a little bit of extra weight.
Then it's painted and powder coated
and sent on its way.
A pour molded cast aluminum wheel
generally needs more material
to maintain enough strength
to pass regulated wheel strength tests.
And more material inevitably means more weight.
This is especially true with your more complex faces
and larger designs.
Cast aluminum wheels are some of the cheapest on the market
under a steel wheel.
That's because the casting process
has less steps involved
and is more efficient to produce.
Forged aluminum, monoblock, or single piece wheels,
on the other hand, are, well,
literally forged from giant billet blocks of aluminum.
Essentially you have
what is a cylindrical shape of billet aluminum
that gets put under a press,
and that thing gets squeezed into a die.
That's gonna give you the rough shape of a wheel.
Essentially, it's gonna be
kind of a blank faced (mumbles) wheel.
From here, it will get a face machined out of it
before going through a few different final finishing stages.
The big difference between a forged wheel and a cast wheel
is gonna be the structure of the material.
A cast wheel is gonna have a grain structure
that's pretty, well, kinda randomizing all over the place.
Like we talked about this before,
this forces you to use more material
to meet the same strength standards,
whereas a forged unit is gonna have
a more aligned grain structure.
This is gonna significantly increase
the strength of this wheel,
and that's gonna allow for the manufacturer
to actually use less material on the wheel,
thus making it significantly more lightweight.
Although this process is much more tedious,
and thus carries quite a bit heftier of a price tag.
The same process really follows
for your multi-piece wheels as well.
You're gonna get a forged inner barrel,
a forged outer barrel,
and a forged face.
And then you would assemble them
all together with hardware.
The advantage of a three-piece wheel
is really to be able to dial in some custom fitment.
This is also where you start to see
some really cool color themes come together as well.
You can get varying colors on each individual piece
to go with whatever theme
that you could possibly imagine (burps).
From a polished outer lip with a black barrel
with a bright blue face with gold hardware,
the combinations are quite literally endless.
But while a three-piece forged wheel
may seem like the best of the best,
there are two kinda pretty large drawbacks.
A, cost to manufacture and package this kind of product
is extremely expensive.
We're talking about 5, 6, $7,000 for a set of four to start.
And when you look at the added material
to make these pieces come together,
plus all the hardware,
it's really easy to start exceeding weight expectations
when compared to a fully forged monoblock
or one-piece wheel.
Your two-pieced wheels
hit that kind of in between mark here.
You get a fully forged one-piece barrel
with a separate fully forged face.
Weight and cost are down just a bit here as well,
but without sacrificing that look.
And then between a full casting
and fully forged monoblock wheels
is gonna be your rotary forming, rotary forging,
ArtFormed, MAT, whatever you wanna call it.
Rotary forming, or whatever anyone decides to name it,
is taking some of the best attributes
of a cast and a forged wheel,
and kinda putting them together
and combining their powers
to produce a wheel that is lighter and stronger
than a fully cast wheel,
without all the super expensive processes
of a fully forged wheel.
Essentially, what this is is a cast wheel
with kind of a twist.
So let's just say we want an 18"x10" wheel.
We're gonna pour a cast wheel
that's about 18"x5" wide,
and then we're gonna take that casting,
we're gonna put it up on a rotary die.
And then what's gonna happen
is we're gonna heat up the wheel
and we're gonna spin it really fast,
while a machine uses a thin wheel
to press on the barrel while it spins
to smash and stretch that barrel out to about 10" wide.
This actually reshapes the grain structure of the material
to make it more inline,
similar to that structure of a fully forged wheel.
So now what we have is an 18"x10" wheel
that only uses as much material
and thus only weighs as much as that 18"x5" cast.
Pretty neat, right?
- That's pretty neat.
- This is exactly what we did with Artisa wheels,
and that's why we can have a 19x11 wheel
that comes in at less than 23 pounds,
or an 18x9-1/2 wheel that comes in under 20 pounds
without exceeding the cost
of your more well-known, popular cast wheel.
And then there's magnesium wheels.
Magnesium wheels are, well,
they're exactly that,
they're wheels made of a magnesium alloy.
But up until the 1960s,
aftermarket wheel manufacturers
were using cast magnesium for production
as aluminum manufacturing technology
was kind of battling the brittleness of that material.
Modern forged magnesium alloy wheels
are light years ahead of the old-school mag wheels
from cast magnesium.
Magnesium has several benefits to make it
a more attractive base metal for wheels than aluminum.
Magnesium is the lightest
metallic structure material available,
being about 1.5 times less dense than aluminum.
So magnesium can be designed to be significantly lighter
than aluminum wheels,
while exhibiting comparable strength.
A lot of your competition-use racing wheels
are made of forged magnesium,
and that's really kind of their only modern and current use.
Anyway, getting into a magnesium race wheel
is probably about as legit as you can get
for a motorsport-oriented wheel,
but they are pretty damn expensive.
You're gonna be looking at 7 to $1,200 per wheel,
but you're getting into one of the lightest wheels
you can possibly get.
These are pretty well going to be strictly for race teams
looking to get every ounce of performance
out of their purpose-built race cars
with a big budget,
not necessarily a wheel for a street car
that sees some track use.
Now that we know what all of this sort of means,
narrowing down what's best for you
should be hopefully a little bit easier.
But maybe my personal favorite on this list
is gonna have to be that rotary forming process.
Now I'm not knocking
any of the big-balling forged multi-piece wheels.
I'd love to have some of those someday.
But from an actual consumer perspective,
I gotta say rotary-formed wheels
present a ton of value to the average car enthusiast.
It's the best combination of cost to weight and strength
on the market right now,
and that's why I run them
on all of my vehicles with aftermarket wheels.
Well, that about wraps it up for this one, guys.
I hope I was able to give you some insight
on what all of these different terms and processes
mean and do for you
and can help you narrow down your options
to get you closer to your dream set of wheels.
Subscribe if you're new.
We do all kinds of crazy stuff here,
and you're not gonna wanna miss any of it.
And as always, wheels, tires, suspension,
merchandise, underglow, detailing products,
and much more over at fitmentindustries.com.
I'm Sean, @seanb.fi on Instagram.
Thank you so much for watching.
Peace.