Might be a little off topic, but I get so many good answers here. Had a bad experience this weekend. My car is less than 4 years old. 6 months out of warranty of course. Please bear with me. Anyway, I go to the carwash and three of my chrome rims cracked. I thought initially, it was the carwash. It wasn't. Apparently, they have been corroding from the inside out. That morning, they looked brand new, not a scratch. So when the cold water hit the hot rim, the chrome finally peeled up. Now for three to go at the exact same time tells me it's something with how they are made. All of them start from the center of the rim which happens to have a metal emblem there. I'm thinking it was galvanic corrosion. It sits about flush with the plate layer. When I pried the metal center cap out (which was fused in there), it looked very much like an old battery terminal. (The haze on the front is just the gunk from the center) Anyway to tell if this is the cause? I'm going to try and talk to the dealer and if it anyone can give me some ammo that says it's a manufacturing issue , I'd greatly appreciate it. I think it has to be given that they went at exactly the same time. The other thing that makes me think this is that my car is made in two models, a dodge version and my chrysler version. The dodge outsells my car by over 10 to 1. No reports of this problem on the dodge, but the dodge has a plastic center cap. The 300m apparently had this problem and it too has the same center cap. There's a bit more detail and larger pics here Any help or comment would be appreciated. Thanks.
If they're cracks running from the central hole, it's stress-corrosion cracking, starting from the heavily cold-worked region at the punched hole edge. Filling the hole with the emblem, whether plastic or metal, makes things worse as you get a fine crevice between the two parts to hold moisture and salts (both road salt and corrosion products) and crevice corrosion gets involved. Proper stress-relief heat-treatment after forming the part would prevent it, but these days that's an extra operation, costs money, so gets skipped. From here, That's hydrogen embrittlement, basically there are loads of things that can go wrong if quality control isn't 100% for every stage of the processing.
Thanks for the info. It still strikes me as odd that none of the plastic capped dodges have the problem. Seems like everytime I make some headway on my various car projects, something else goes wrong.
