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Hey everyone. Just want to make a post to describe the experience I had ordering and dealing with Race Tech Forged for a set of their wheels.
This all started back on January 30th when I saw his wheels on the forum here and really liked them. I inquired through PM and started emailing with Raz. He quotes me a sale price due to a certain special they were running at the time. He then pressures me after a few emails to at least put $1000 down for a deposit as the sale was ending and they would be back to full price. I wasn't fully prepared to put a deposit on them for at least another week, but I end up doing it anyways to get the sale price. I realize later, I don't think these wheels have ever been sold not on their sale price as they are constantly on "special". Also ordered some center caps which were quite expensive!
I end up putting the 50% deposit down on February 10th and am told they have an average lead time of 21 says. So about a month until my wheels are done, not bad. Most places took about 6 weeks that I had contacted.
Up until this point, emails have been great, always responsive, always picks up the phone when I call, info is always provided. No issues.
Oh boy did that change. On March 3rd, I requested pics of the wheels as they should be close to done by that point. He sends me a picture of a single wheel not painted at all. Could be my wheel, could be anyone else's as they did not have much variety of designs at that point. I ask him how much longer until they are ready to ship and he tells me they are still engineering the front wheels as the 9.5" that I had requested was not made by them yet. I was not informed of this at all and would have liked to know. I am then informed that these wheels would require suspension or other modification to make it fit properly. Again, was not told this at all and was a huge No-no. I adjusted the order to a 9" front wheel and told them to continue with that.
March 10th rolls around, I again ask Raz if the wheels are complete as he sent me an invoice for the remaining balance (did not pay this yet). I was told they did not meet the finish day and weren't quite ready yet. I say that's fine and ask if he knows when they can be expected to ship. No answer. 10 days later, after a couple more emails and phone calls he replies back saying they are in the final stages and will be sent to the finisher this week. Says he will send pictures asap.
April 1st (2 weeks after last communication and several not returned voicemails) I ask again what is going on with my wheels as it has been far longer than he said to complete these wheels. Spring was approaching quickly and I was itching to have the new wheels for the start of the season. April 6th, he finally replies back with a picture of black wheels without the red lettering I had paid for. Says it has to get sent back to the finisher again.
April 12th, I finally get a picture of one complete wheel with the red lettering. I give him the green light to charge me for the remaining 50% and get those wheels shipped asap! I request a tracking number as soon as they ship.
....And I wait a week. Called the shop several times, emailed, PM'd, took forever to get a response. He finally sends me a tracking number and all was well with the rest of the order. Hah! Yeah right. UPS has nothing on file for the tracking number he gave me and the label that he sent a picture of has a shipping date of April 25th (the following Monday) and a wrong phone number for me.
At this point, it has been 50 business days since I placed my order and I was quoted 21. I express my displeasure and say it is not acceptable to keep me waiting because they get a discount on Mondays. Order should have shipped the previous Monday regardless but he claims the truck never arrived.
April 22nd I am told by Raz the wheels had left and been shipped and I would have a tracking number as soon as the "Warehouse manager" gets in. By April 28th, I have still received no info and am pissed off. I email and call several times and nothing. He intentionally screens my calls so I have to resort to calling him on random numbers. He finally says the tracking numbers should have remained the same and to use them. May 3rd is the next time I hear from him, he says there was an error with the shipment and I would be receiving them Thursday (May 5th).
It was on this point, May 3rd, that my entire city was engulfed in flames in the Fort McMurray Wildfire and we were all evacuated that afternoon. I finally got ahold of him and informed him delivery would be impossible to my city and gave him a new address to ship the wheels to.
I believe I finally got the wheels around May 10th at the new address. Finally, the nightmare was over! Except not. Not even close. After all this, he never shipped my center caps which I paid a ridiculous amount of money for. Was pretty upset to find that out and realize I now had to go through this nightmare of dealing with them again.
May 16th, I was told over the phone the center caps would be shipped that day and I would receive a tracking number. Next day I followed up as I had still not received a tracking number. Would not hear about the caps again until June 13th when he said the caps were at the finisher and should be shipped soon. (I thought they were already made?!?!)
May 31st however, I ran into another problem. One of the rear wheels wobbled. My tire installer put the wheel and tire on their rotation machine, and the wheel was not spinning straight and had a bad wobble. This is not acceptable for a fairly premium wheel and I immediately got to work on contacting Raz again. Under his instruction through email, I was able to put the wheel and tire on my car for the time being, and he would ship me a replacement wheel and I would ship the old one back once I receive the replacement.
After requesting info several times publicly on the forums in his thread, I had multiple people private messaging me telling me of their similar problems with their orders. Many of them were exactly as he told me as well for excuses. Two people even cancelled their orders after speaking with me on my experiences.
At some point I finally did receive my center caps. It wasn't until August 24th that I finally received my replacement wheel. I got the new wheel and tire swapped onto the car, boxed up the old one at the performance shop my car was at and as of this day, it is still sitting there waiting to be scheduled and picked up by UPS as Raz said he would arrange. I am in a different city than my car for the last 2.5 months and it is quite the hassle for me to get anything done with it but I got it that far for him.
Now, after all this, I will stand by the product. The wheels were nice, I like them, and very lightweight as promised. The one having the manufacturing defect was a pain, but it is fixed now. My engine blew up this summer and as such I haven't been able to get good pictures at all, but I will post what I have. The company however, is the worst company I have ever dealt with in my entire life and I cannot recommend enough to not buy from them. Its just not worth the nightmare of a headache I and several others have had. They are welcome to speak up, but I will not name names if they do not want to come forward. The reason this was not posted earlier was I was worried I may not get my products if I had spoken out. The minute he had my money, he basically cut contact except for the rare time after many attempts were made by myself. It's been 8 months now since I ordered my wheels and I am still not finished with this one simple transaction.
Last edited by blue_bomber697; 10-12-2016 at 10:24 PM.
Beautiful wheels. I am sorry that it took 6 months to get them to you and can understand why you wanted to lay low until it all got done. Unfortunately there have been a fairly large number of wheel companies that put out good products but end up going under. Part of that is because they get 50% of the money up front before they have to do a thing. And in the pressure of business and making ends meet they spend that deposit rather than deposit it. So now they have to run their business like a Ponzi Scheme (BTW, I don't know this is RTFs problem, but it has happened to a number of us with other companies that are no longer here.) So they take 2 deposits from Customer C and D and use that to get out Customer As wheels. Now they need to find Customer E and F to get the money to get out Customer Bs wheels. A few months later they realize they are behind the 8 ball and declare Bankruptcy. Again no idea if that is going on with RTF but it makes me very careful about buying wheels. Other than HRE and maybe 1 or 2 others it is definitely buyer beware.
To give you an idea how bad this can get, there used to be a really good wine store in NorCal. He sold very high end wines and was doing well. One type of wine sale is Bordeaux Futures. So 18 months before delivery you buy your wine and it gets delivered 18 months later. This particular wine store started spending the income for the futures and then having to cover by buying the wine when it came available 18 months later. They were able to increase their sales each year for a long number of years (10-15) til they just couldn't keep all the ***** in the air. They declared bankruptcy early this year listing $70 Million Dollars in debts to folks that had ordered futures or sold them wine. That was a pretty capable guy that just got lost in the ability to live a good life and cover it later, until he couldn't.
So the minute you start hearing stories on slow deliveries, you should start worrying that they are having problems covering older paid for orders. It is really too bad, because a lot of these companies have really produced really good wheels until the business end simply overwhelmed them.
Beautiful wheels. I am sorry that it took 6 months to get them to you and can understand why you wanted to lay low until it all got done. Unfortunately there have been a fairly large number of wheel companies that put out good products but end up going under. Part of that is because they get 50% of the money up front before they have to do a thing. And in the pressure of business and making ends meet they spend that deposit rather than deposit it. So now they have to run their business like a Ponzi Scheme (BTW, I don't know this is RTFs problem, but it has happened to a number of us with other companies that are no longer here.) So they take 2 deposits from Customer C and D and use that to get out Customer As wheels. Now they need to find Customer E and F to get the money to get out Customer Bs wheels. A few months later they realize they are behind the 8 ball and declare Bankruptcy. Again no idea if that is going on with RTF but it makes me very careful about buying wheels. Other than HRE and maybe 1 or 2 others it is definitely buyer beware.
Very well could be whats going on. Other members had identical issues to mine. I definitely would've spent a bit more money and gone with PUR wheels if I could do it all over again. Risking it on the lesser known company is not a move I will be making again.
Very well could be whats going on. Other members had identical issues to mine. I definitely would've spent a bit more money and gone with PUR wheels if I could do it all over again. Risking it on the lesser known company is not a move I will be making again.
I will chime in to back up blue_bomber's experiences. I also placed an order with this company and paid the full, nearly $5000 at the time of ordering. Raz was super nice to communicate with over the phone. Not seeing any records of the company's transactions and deliveries I was careful enough to charge the amounts on my American Express card, which has guaranteed satisfaction clause on purchases.
Make a long story short, just about the same experience as described by the OP. For what ever reasons, Raz was stringing me out on the deliveries, always finding a reason for a delay. I begun to think that he was running a Ponzi scheme, using my monies for other customer's orders. I Googled the store address printed on one of their stationery and Street View showed me a dump, surrounded by barbed wires. Not very confidence inspiring!
Weeks passed and Raz stopped returning my calls completely. When given an ultimatum to deliver, he produced a similar Shipping label with UPS that, of course, never got filled. The shipping address showed up on Google as a high rise apartment building in LA.
I gave him one more ultimatum over email (could not get in touch with him anymore over the phone) which he ignored. At that point I notified American Express. They tried to contact him, giving him a chance to explain the lack of delivery of a product. Raz never answered the inquiry from American Express. At that point my full deposit was returned to me by AMEX. I asked the AMEX rep how they deal with this issue, since the payment was made well over 2 months back. They reassured me that they had the tools and methods... :-).
In the posted pictures the wheels that they make look great on the cars. I am left to believe that there are (were) serious financial issues with the company and, that is putting it mildly. Googling the claimed locations on Street View indicated much more serious issues that I don't care to get involved with.
Glad blue_bomber that you got your wheels. We communicated with each other over these issues and I had also refrained to post on the forum, hoping blue-bomber's issues would eventually be resolved. Glad to see that it worked out.
I really liked the wheels but, no way would I recommend dealing with Raz and his "company" given my and other's experiences.
^^^ Most of these wheel guys must be like this. When I went thur 365 wheels which was a vendor in here also this guy here gave me a post and said how sorry he was for me.
Plus he ask if he could help me with a set of his.
Hopefully Raz can come on this thread and post some facts that will make us continue to work with him. I also think it is important for the Mods to let us know if he is still paying for his freight to be a forum vendor. If he is, he has some money and may recover. If he isn't then everyone better contact their CC company.
Let's don't let this get to the Pfadt level where a huge number of people were stiffed by the BK.
I do notice he has a new post up today. So he is still around. Hopefully able to finish all existing orders and to continue as a viable business. They certainly make some great designs and everyone that has received wheels seems to be very happy.
Hopefully Raz can come on this thread and post some facts that will make us continue to work with him. I also think it is important for the Mods to let us know if he is still paying for his freight to be a forum vendor. If he is, he has some money and may recover. If he isn't then everyone better contact their CC company.
Let's don't let this get to the Pfadt level where a huge number of people were stiffed by the BK.
I do notice he has a new post up today. So he is still around. Hopefully able to finish all existing orders and to continue as a viable business. They certainly make some great designs and everyone that has received wheels seems to be very happy.
I would love for him to come into this thread and explain what happened. A little transparency would be nice. I also saw that he was posting today in a couple sections yet no response in this thread.
Even if it isn't great business practices, I would love to hear the truth as to what happened instead of the constant excuses. It very much could be money issues for the company.
I also have bought rims from them. During the talks about buying rims I would get emails returned to me at 2a or 3a. Once I paid 5k to them, the email response time slowed down. I am forced to send 3-4 of the same emails before I get a reply.
Blue gave me the heads up but it was to late for me. I had already sent the money to them.
Unfortunately this appears to be Morr happening all over again. The product is great if you get it, but there definitely appears to be some frantic financial juggling going on. I hate to see this as both Morr and RTF produce(d) great wheels. If they follow in Morr's footsteps it will be another loss to the sport.
I also had several back and forth EMAIL's from them late last year and the beginning of this year. The price seemed good and the Wheels looked nice. I ended up getting a great price on some Forgeline VX1's through this forum. Glad I went that route.
Originally Posted by Elite275
Thanks for sharing your experience. Glad I ponied up for the Forgelines now instead when I was considering these.
Wow, I don't know what's going on over there but I got my RTF wheels in about 8 weeks....
Raz told me 3-4 wks but I could not settle on a finish, so I can't blame him there at all. I did get email responses in the early morning hours but is it a crime to work late? I'm sorry some people are having issues, but I have to say my RTF Spec 5's are awesome in my opinion. The weight is right on the money and I could not be happier with the finish.
I went 19" all the way around because I run drag radials full-time, the fit, finish, and offsets are all perfect. The clearances around my CC brakes tell me they went full-tilt on the concave aspect of these wheels, very tight indeed.
Just to be clear, I own HRE, CCW, and Forgeline.....they quality and price are going to be very hard to beat on the RTF. And since my post would be worthless without a pic
The design is identical to those produced by Rennen forged with the exception of the Script that says RTF etc. I experienced a very similar situation with what you have described and ended up disputing the charge with my credit card company. During the period that I was waiting for my wheels Robert Miller and a few others reached out to me to offer support. I did some more research, found where they were being manufactured and called them directly, that's when things started moving in my favor. At the time the manufacturing facility was less than an hour from where I lived. I merely had to threaten visiting them and 2 days later I received my wheels in a less than spectacular condition. I returned them to be refinished and had them returned a second time about a week later. I originally ordered as a SEMA special (Nov. 2015) and they weren't delivered until April 2016.
There was an issue with the shipping of your wheels as well as 3 other members wheels during the same time. Unfortunately there also was a lack of communications between you and Raz during the process which is unacceptable.
We would like to let all the members know that we've operated out of the same location for over 48 years our facility has been working with the DOD, US Air Force, US Navy and Boeing for over 30 years we specialize in aerospace engineering and machining.
We might be a new wheel manufacturer as far as wheel world goes but our engineers combined have over 60 years of knowledge in aerospace machining and engineering which is all applied to our wheel program.
We have some of the tights tolerance levels in the wheel industry compared to many wheel companies and you can admit the final product is well manufactured. The fitment isn't an issue at all the wheels fit perfect on your car without you having to modify a single thing.
We did change the one wheel which somehow ended up damaged from shipping and we did that without hesitation.
We would like to say sorry that the order did take longer than expected and that the communication wasn't as open and transparent between you and Raz
We can wait to see the final pictures once the cars on the road again.
After looking at you post on new wheels mounted we want to say thank you very much for sharing your experience your wheel does look VERY VERY similar how did you come about ordering that design?
Please PM us this info if possible.
Originally Posted by Rob#2
The design is identical to those produced by Rennen forged with the exception of the Script that says RTF etc. I experienced a very similar situation with what you have described and ended up disputing the charge with my credit card company. During the period that I was waiting for my wheels Robert Miller and a few others reached out to me to offer support. I did some more research, found where they were being manufactured and called them directly, that's when things started moving in my favor. At the time the manufacturing facility was less than an hour from where I lived. I merely had to threaten visiting them and 2 days later I received my wheels in a less than spectacular condition. I returned them to be refinished and had them returned a second time about a week later. I originally ordered as a SEMA special (Nov. 2015) and they weren't delivered until April 2016.
The design is identical to those produced by Rennen forged with the exception of the Script that says RTF etc. I experienced a very similar situation with what you have described and ended up disputing the charge with my credit card company. During the period that I was waiting for my wheels Robert Miller and a few others reached out to me to offer support. I did some more research, found where they were being manufactured and called them directly, that's when things started moving in my favor. At the time the manufacturing facility was less than an hour from where I lived. I merely had to threaten visiting them and 2 days later I received my wheels in a less than spectacular condition. I returned them to be refinished and had them returned a second time about a week later. I originally ordered as a SEMA special (Nov. 2015) and they weren't delivered until April 2016.
Wait, who did you threaten to visit? RTF or Rennen? Are you saying RTF buys from them and is just a reseller?
10-12-2016, 06:39 PM
My experience with Race Tech Forged
