I am curious to hear if it would actually be cheaper to get some crappy wheels and have them re-finished than buying already re-finished ones. If that wheel place is too expensive, you could always find a powder coating place and see what they would charge to do them. Powder coating is usually pretty reasonable and they blast the wheels before powder coating them, so any damage, etc. would be taken care of. Another option is to sand the wheels down, etc. yourself and use PlastiDip on them. PlastiDip comes in many colors, including a silver that is pretty much the same as the color of most factory alloy wheels and it's cheap. Check out
dipyourcar.com for more info on using PlastiDip on wheels. Or, instead of PlastiDip and for something more permanent, you could always paint them with spray paint.
DupliColor has a line of wheel-specific paint, including primer, color and clear coat.
That's scary about the 13 year old tire
! We have the original Goodyear Eagle F1 A/S-C tires on our 2009 GTs and I am planning on replacing them when tax refund time rolls around again because they're starting to show signs of wear due to age i.e. slight cracking, etc. They're just under 5 years old and only have probably about 30,000 miles on them, so I can't even imagine what a 13 year old tire would look like
.