Four months for (and four) corrosion worries.
If you’d like to see the part one of this mini series, peek the embedded link at the bottom of the post…
Over four months since the really bad ideation and execution of this “experimental” run, the wheels that I was very excited for in January… have finally (disappointingly) arrived. Now, it wasn’t necessarily a four month process – in fact it would be closer to three but not being in Malaysia often hampered collection – but it was a long ordeal.
It starts with a letter summoned to my delivery address in April stating that my shipment was detained by local customs. In the letter, the summary is that I would need to pay a customs fee – which is expected.
In the letter, I had two options for handling the case; settling it with the shipping company’s agent which was a RM48 fee, or handling it myself with my own agent. I don’t have the latter.
Annoyingly, the letter was sent late. Even more annoying was no email sent though the phone number I had placed was expired. The time interval is important as the company stated that after a month of no action, the shipment would be taken in by them. They sent me the physical letter for action half a month after it was detained, so half the time to get through them.
Required was an invoice of the item (so no dodging impending taxes). This company that I will not name had dead hotlines, a not-so intuitive application with a lack of call-to-action in important sections. At least the AI agent they had could route me easily to a real person.
The customer service agent requested an email be sent to them, which I happily found out that the email they provided was the Kuala Lumper branch, and that the item was in Bukit Mertajam Customs and therefore out of their jurisdiction.
So extra downtime later contacting the right customs, there was progression that was forwarding the relevant description of the item and price. What served me next was a sum of RM817.60 – included with that agent fee of RM50.90.
Five days later, the wheels finally arrived! And checking them now… shit.
Yup, these indeed need restoration. Not that I’m surprised by the condition as seen in the previous post – I knew and understood that it would need to be done up – but its more complicated now after its trip up from Japan to Malaysia.
Now that I know, I shouldn’t have skipped out on protecting the shipment as the box was very tattered. Moisture undoubtedly got into the shipment at some point and it has done damage to the wheels.
Corrosion is on basically every part of the wheel, crusting already at the lug holes, which as I’m told are restorable but its not pretty. Attached below is the worst wheel affected.
Every wheel was affected by the rust, one happily having only light surface corrosion but rust is rust – it needs to be treated immediately.
Otherwise, the wheel is as is from the photos. They’re battered, two wheels having some sort of dented lip – terrible, but the aim was to restore them before I use them.
So, the total from initial purchase to sitting in my house totals out to… S$860.38 as of today. Not great… if I wanted wheels in 4×100 guise, replica sets are available in 15-inch sizes for a quarter of the price, but without MUGEN collector’s tax for a real piece… I’ll take what I can get.
~Efini
Read more: Fuel for Thought: Buying wheels from overseas and the journey (Pt. 1)
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