How to photograph
a wheel for a quote

We quote from photographs all day. The difference between a figure and a vague range is almost never the phone — it is daylight, angle and framing, and all three take about ten seconds to get right.

Daylight, not the garage

Artificial light flattens everything. Under a fluorescent tube a deep gouge and a light scuff look identical, and a corroded face looks like a dirty one.

Outside, in ordinary daylight, is enough. Direct sun is actually worse than overcast because the glare hides detail, so a bright cloudy day is ideal.

Straight on to the rim

Crouch down so the camera is level with the middle of the wheel, and shoot square to the face rather than from above or along the car.

Photographing at an angle foreshortens the rim edge, which is exactly the part we need to assess. A wheel shot from standing height tells us very little about the damage on it.

The whole wheel, including the tyre

A close-up of the damage on its own has no scale. We cannot tell whether a mark is two centimetres or ten, and those are different jobs.

Get the whole wheel in frame with a bit of tyre showing. That gives us the diameter, the spoke design and the finish in one picture.

• One photo of the worst wheel is usually enough to price the set.
• If the others differ a lot, send those too.
• If the inner barrel is damaged, a photo from behind the wheel helps.
• A ten-second video works as well as a photo if something is easier to show than describe.

And tell us the size

It is stamped on the tyre wall: the two-digit number after the R. On a tyre reading 225/40 R18 94Y, the wheel is an eighteen.

Size changes the price because bigger wheels take more material, more masking and more oven time. Without it we can only give you a range, which is the thing this whole page is trying to avoid.

Send all of that to the number on the contact page and you will usually have a figure the same working day.