I had been looking for a new set of shoes for our 1985 BMW 323i Baur TC2. As much as I loved the original look of the 14-inch bottlecap-style wheels, especially on an early chrome-bumper E30 3 Series, finding decent medium- to high-performance all-season tires had become challenging.

Additionally, the bottlecaps on the car were all bent. I can hear a certain friend saying to himself, or maybe to me, “how the hell do you bend bottlecaps?!” Hey, they were bent when they showed up here! Regardless, spending the money to have them all repaired and refinished seemed silly, primarily but not entirely because of the aforementioned lack of tire choices.

After going down the Maxilite reproduction Alpina and Euroweave rabbit hole – and many, many other rabbit holes – I stumbled across a set of OE BMW Style 10 wheels last January on an E30 Facebook group. I’ve been a fan of these wheels since first spotting them on a perfect Zinnoberrot plastic-bumper E30 325is at a BMW car show in Connecticut probably close to 30 years ago.

While Style 10s came in other sizes and fitments, the set on offer measured 15×7 with a 4×100 bolt pattern and an ET24 offset. More pleasing, they came wrapped in basically new Kumho Ecsta AST tires, sized 225-50/15. In other words, just about the perfect +1 (plus a bit more) sizing for a youngtimer E30.

Lynchburg, Virginia, is about three hours south from my TTS cohort Reed’s base of operations. Ultimately, I convinced the seller Ben and Reed to meet up around Charlottesville where Reed’s sister lives. The wheels and tires were collected and squirreled away in Reed’s garage. But how now to get them home to Minnesota?

Perhaps obviously, people buy and ship wheels and/or tires all the time. Not only new product, but used sets also trade hands all over the world. Heck, I’ve bought more than a few wheels or tires – or both, mounted and balanced – from places like Tire Rack. How hard could it be to ship myself a set? Turns out, not very hard at all.

The first step is to check the shipping companies you already know and don’t abjectly hate, in my case FedEx and UPS. Entering the approximate weight, dimensions, and wrapping/packaging into FedEx’s website from roughly 22031 home to the Twin Cities yielded a cost of $75 each, which seemed really cheap.

Indeed, maybe a little too cheap. I called the FedEx office down the street and gave the guy all the same information. The nice fellow clicked and clacked and then came back with essentially the same price. Three hundred dollars, while not nothing, was a bargain. He replied that freight can be reasonably inexpensive, especially if there are multiples of the same package.

As luck would have it, my wife and I were visiting Reed and his wife in the early part of last year. After we landed on a Friday morning we went to Home Depot. Two rolls of their heavier-duty bubble wrap and a tape gun – plus a bunch of cardboard boxes Reed had left over from his garage project furnishings – and we were ready to wrap and tape.

After a short amount of time and some minor bloodletting – cardboard cuts suck about as much as paper cuts – we tossed the packages in the back seat of Reed’s Toyota Tundra and went over to FedEx. Measured and weighed, the total tab was under $275 for all four. Fun fact: Each tire and wheel package weighs around 45 pounds.

I asked about delivery timing. This was around 3:30 PM on Friday. The nice FedEx ladies said they had a truck out back they were loading up that was heading, with a few stops along the way, straight in the direction of Minnesota. They’d be at my door by 9:00 PM Sunday.

We left Virginia Sunday before lunchtime and were home by about 2:30 PM. The tires landed by 4:00 PM. They almost beat us back! This adventure started on Thursday, February 29, and these “before/after” pictures were taken on March 4.

Last winter was very mild and wonderfully dry. No snow meant no salt on the roads, which meant I could bolt these on immediately and go for a drive. The wheels have clearly been refinished to a basically decent standard. They look fine by themselves and great mounted up. More importantly they match the overall condition of the car.

“Casual, but nice,” as the band They Might Be Giants might have once said.