As the old joke goes, time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana. (BOOM-tish. I’ll be here all night. Tip your bartenders and waitresses.) I’ve owned the 2003 E39 530i stick sport for a decade, but certain things seem like they happened just yesterday.
When I bought the car in the winter of 2016, it had a set of aftermarket wheels on it that were so awful they looked like they were grabbed on clearance at Pep Boys. I immediately went looking for an affordable set of the 17-inch Style 42s two-piece wheels that an E39 sport package car is supposed to have. I found a set whose clear coat had failed and were badly corroded, and I had to drive up to Maine to get them, but they were just $125. Then I found a second set in similar condition for $100.
The wheels on it when I bought it really were awful.
The Style 42s were cheap for a reason.
Like I said, corroded.
I selected the straightest four wheels out of the set of eight, and thought “How hard could refinishing them be?” I naively had at it. I wrote a six-part series about it long-enough ago that it was hosted on the BMW CCA website before BimmerLife was a thing.
Now, if you’re like me (and I think we’ve established that many of you are), you don’t mind learning these sort of lessons. That is, you can do something yourself instead of paying someone else and come out of it thinking “That worked out great” or “Well I’ll never do that again.” Refinishing the Style 42s fell utterly and completely into the latter camp. It was an insane amount of work. I’ll never do it again. And even though I didn’t drive on them in the winter, they soon began corroding. Plus, I shod them with cheap used tires I found on Craigslist. When I took them into a tire shop for mounting and balancing, they me that two of the tires had cracked sidewalls. “Show me,” I said. They took me into the back and pointed to the fine cracks. “You’re worried about that?” I said. “Just mount them please. I don’t drive much.” About a month later I had a rear blowout at speed on I-95, and had to admit to myself that it was one of the tires I was warned about. That lesson I did learn.
A BMW CCA member in Florida named Toby who was reading about my travails took pity on me and offered me his no-longer-used set of three dead-mint dead-straight Style 42s for the cost of shipping. I had one mint one that I was hoarding as my spare. I gratefully took Toby up on his offer. With a set of lovely intact Style 42s in my hand, I bought real tires. Well, real cheap tires—Achilles 235/45R17 ATR Sports from a tire dealer on eBay for $235 shipped. (All of this is explained in more detail here). There’s no question that Achilles was third-tier rubber, but they’ve been great. Unfortunately, the poor choice of name appears to have caught up with Achilles; if they’re still in business, they no longer sell tires in this or the 185/70R13 size I routinely bought for the 2002s.
So, eight years ago I finally had a clean shiny set of 17-inch Style 42s and decent rubber on the E39. I was elated.
Booya!
Fast-forward to now. Even though pull the once-gorgeous Style 42s off during the winter, the eight years has taken its toll, with clear-coat failure and corrosion having taken hold.
To quote Yeats, I look at you, and I sigh.
More serious is the fact that, when I began swapping the Style 42s back on this spring, an inspection of the tires revealed that they were alarmingly degraded. I wasn’t inherently scared off by the 2017 date codes, as it’s not like I’m commuting anywhere. But two of the tires had significant sidewall gouges, and several of them showed evidence of tread cracking on the edges. That’s a lesson I did learn.
Yeah, you can’t unsee that.
That’s way not good.
Now, if you’re like me (again, established), the idea of buying new tires and getting them mounted and balanced on wheels that could really stand to be refinished gives you pause. In this situation, to me, whether it’s for winter or summer tires, it’s a clear win if you can find a good set of tires already mounted and balanced on good wheels (as the motto for an online used tire warehouse says, “Every tire you see on the road is a used tire”). So I began looking, knowing that the likelihood of finding a set of intact Style 42s with fresh rubber for a steal was vanishingly small.
But just before the 4th of July, I saw an ad on Facebook Marketplace that read “Excellent BMW Style 82 Wheel set 5×120 16″. Very clean set of BMW Style 82 wheels from an E39. No curb rash or damage to any of the rims, new tires on all 4 used for less than a thousand miles. $250.” Photographs of the tires showed Falken Ziex E960 225/55R16 tires with 2024 date codes, and the inside of the wheel was photographed from which I could verify the part number and offset.
Unfortunately the seller was out in western Massachusetts, and I was tied up around the holiday. I messaged him saying that I wanted them but that it might take me a few days to get out there, but if he assured me the wheels were straight and the tires were free of damage, I’d Venmo him the money now. He said no money was necessary; he’d hold them for me until the week after the 4th. When I had the opportunity, I shot out there in Maire Anne’s Honda. You can’t really tell if a wheel is bent until you spin it, but the wheels and tires appeared free of any apparent damage. I handed over the money (when something is well-priced, I don’t bargain for sport).
Score.
My back situation being what it is, for the first time ever I pressed my son Ethan into swapping the wheels (he loves driving the E39 and will help me whenever I ask him, but he doesn’t have car-guy blood in his veins). I was initially sad about this, as I’ve long felt that swapping wheels is about the most trivial thing you can do on a car, and if I can no longer do that, I can no longer do anything. But as I stepped through the process of safely jacking up a car, swapping wheels, spinning them to check for straightness (bent ones need to go on the back), and torquing lug nuts with him, watched him do it, and realized that I do this at least four times a year (two daily drivers, winter and summer), even more often with non-seasonal swaps, and in fact did it not long before these back issues roared to the forefront, I thought “Man I was doing a lot of work without being aware of it. Maybe being able to hand this off to Ethan isn’t such a bad thing.”
The torch is passed.
Not bad, right? At a glance, they even look not dissimilar from the Style 42s.
To my delight, all four of the wheels were dead straight. I was, however, concerned about how the new setup would feel. After all, I was replacing the sport setup of 17-inch wheels and 235/45R17 tires with 16-inch wheels and 225/55R16s. I know that, whenever I have the 16-inch winter wheels and tires on the car, I can’t wait to get them off, as they just kill the handling. But it’s fine. The tradeoff is about what I thought it would be. I’m losing a shorter stiffer sidewall but gaining better newer fresher tires, so even when throwing it around an exit ramp, I don’t viscerally feel “Damn, I wish this was snappier like it used to be.”
At my leisure I may look at prices from local wheel-refinishing shops (of course, the fact that the Style 42s are two-piece wheels is likely to make the process more expensive). But for now, the Style 82s and the Falkens are exactly what I needed them to be—safe and affordable.
—Rob Siegel
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Rob’s newly-expanded book The Best Of The Hack Mechanic™: 40 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem, is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies (including the new Best Of) from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com/books.