When fitting some nice rims to your car there is nothing worse than ending up with scrapes and scratches from kerbs.

Other than being totally paranoid and parking miles away from the kerb (which we see many people doing) there are ways to protect your nice new rims.

The general trend at the moment is for a tiny slip of rubber on a large rim. This looks great but when tyres had deep walls the rims rarely made contact with the kerb.

Selecting a tyre with a thick edge around the rim does help surprisingly well. The extra rubber cushions the rim against scrapes and scratches in all but the most extreme cases.

These tyres also look great and come in many different shapes and sizes so you should be able to track a set down that will have suitable rim protection.

When tyres are stretched onto a rim you have pretty much eliminated any chance of the rubber protecting the rim and have dramatically increased the chance of picking up scratches and chunks taken out of your rims.

Your best chance with a stretched tyre is to get a high profile tyre so the rims are not so close to the kerb.

You can see a full range of tyres at your local tyre suppliers where they will stock a very wide range of tyres and many of these come with thicker walls to protect your rims.

We have seen some plastic rim protectors which come in a variety of colours but these in reality only provided limited protection and looked pretty awful after a couple of minor kerb scrapes.

You could also choose a split rim where there is very little metal on the outside edge to come into contact with the kerb.

Whatever you decide it is actually impossible to completely eliminate kerb damage to your alloys and repair or refurbishing becomes the only option.

Faced with 3 really badly kerbed and scratched alloys and needing a new set of tyres I looked on auction sites and found a complete set of perfect rims with tyres for sale of a suitable match for my car at a much lower cost than buying a set of new tyres.