Buying wheels in 1995 "When I was your age..."
Posted: Mon Feb 15, 2010 2:41 pmI found an old Prime Wheel Catalog from 1995 in my parent's basement. I would have been 16 yrs old at this time and I remember my friends and I drooling over this book as if it was a playboy mag. I've always been a wheel whore and couldn't wait to own a set of aftermarket wheels! (it's in my blood- my first word was "wheel" when I was a kid lol)
Sorry for the poor man camera/scanner...
The highlighted 5 star on this page is somewhat similar to the Ultra Wheel I ended up buying. Looking back, thank god I didn't jump on the short lived 3-bar bandwagon lol
some of these wold be baller to own now...like #223 or 187. but once the curvy wheels started coming out in the late 90's, nobody wanted a lot of these anymore.
I'd love me some of those 251's
I specifically remember looking through this and drooling over the barrels on #189. Last year I found a used set on CL for pretty cheap and bought them just because I loved them as a kid lol.
Now we're into the steel wheels in the back of the book.
Things were different in 1995. There was no JDM wheels or JDM anything. The import scene was still very underground. In a few more years, people would start to spray paint interior & exterior bits.
The only aftermarket JDM wheels were found on race cars that only lived on the track. Maybe once in a while you'd see a set of BBS or OZ Racing on something like a corvette or porsche.
The internet was still a piece of crap, most people used AOL. You didn't buy wheels on line. You went to a tire shop and paid retail. Some of your choices were Prime, American Racing, Ultra Wheels. Offset was unheard of... your choice was fwd or rwd. If you were custom ordering, you would measure your backspacing to be sure the wheels cleared the suspension. If you could find & afford 17", you were baller status. There were no kumho's back then either. If you wanted a performance tire, you were paying big bucks for Goodyears or whatever the shop sold.
I ended up getting a set of Ultra Wheels polished 5 stars (smooth style) in 16x7.5 with Goodyear GT+4 for $1200. Ultra wheels were cheap cast wheels, nothing special... The rims were $600, the tires were the other $600. Also there were no tire size calculators back in the day... The 60 series tires the shop recommended were a little too big and threw my speedo off. 55 would have been ideal, but there wasn't much in a 55 series back then. I has a brochure for Ultra Wheels, I'll keep an eye out for that one too.
Sorry for the poor man camera/scanner...
The highlighted 5 star on this page is somewhat similar to the Ultra Wheel I ended up buying. Looking back, thank god I didn't jump on the short lived 3-bar bandwagon lol
some of these wold be baller to own now...like #223 or 187. but once the curvy wheels started coming out in the late 90's, nobody wanted a lot of these anymore.
I'd love me some of those 251's
I specifically remember looking through this and drooling over the barrels on #189. Last year I found a used set on CL for pretty cheap and bought them just because I loved them as a kid lol.
Now we're into the steel wheels in the back of the book.
Things were different in 1995. There was no JDM wheels or JDM anything. The import scene was still very underground. In a few more years, people would start to spray paint interior & exterior bits.
The only aftermarket JDM wheels were found on race cars that only lived on the track. Maybe once in a while you'd see a set of BBS or OZ Racing on something like a corvette or porsche.
The internet was still a piece of crap, most people used AOL. You didn't buy wheels on line. You went to a tire shop and paid retail. Some of your choices were Prime, American Racing, Ultra Wheels. Offset was unheard of... your choice was fwd or rwd. If you were custom ordering, you would measure your backspacing to be sure the wheels cleared the suspension. If you could find & afford 17", you were baller status. There were no kumho's back then either. If you wanted a performance tire, you were paying big bucks for Goodyears or whatever the shop sold.
I ended up getting a set of Ultra Wheels polished 5 stars (smooth style) in 16x7.5 with Goodyear GT+4 for $1200. Ultra wheels were cheap cast wheels, nothing special... The rims were $600, the tires were the other $600. Also there were no tire size calculators back in the day... The 60 series tires the shop recommended were a little too big and threw my speedo off. 55 would have been ideal, but there wasn't much in a 55 series back then. I has a brochure for Ultra Wheels, I'll keep an eye out for that one too.
