I've never seen a set of wheels (4) for $50 unless they were totally garbage and that's not including tires. If you can find 4 tires/wheels for $50 I agree that is a decent deal but then you're not much different than your stock wheels as you said.

 

When it was all said and done, that's all I have in mine, $50 + a 3 hour round trip to Tennessee. So maybe $60 with the gas I used.

I paid $400 for the Cobalt wheels/tires
I sold the stock 16" wheels/tires for $350 locally.

 

When We Installed Ours the Reason was to Get a Factory Appearence ! We Personally Are'nt About Chrome and Flash and "Hey, Look Over Here" !

Kind of Why We Powder Coated Them Silver to Match the Body ! Oh Yes $50.00 is Not a Far Fetched Number as We Purchased our Set for $150.00 !

 

Different strokes for different folks as the sayin goes...If I had the factory alloys on my car to begin with I would have kept those. My car had the steel wheels with hubcaps which I hated, ended up selling those for $100 plus shipping. I imagine the person you bought your wheels from replaced them with aftermarkets because they didn't care for the factory wheels? I'm not into all the chrome and flash either. I bought some aftermarket spoke wheels which are machine finished with silver paint in between the spokes pretty simple but an upgrade from factory look IMO. However, I'm thinking of going back to my original plan and putting on the old school rallye's

 

Personally, I like the Cobalt rims. But since mine came with factory polished "sweet" 17"s. That's working fine for me..

I had headaches with Americam Racing 'Smoothies' back in 1998 for my former S-10
I couldn't get a smooth ride out of them.
I finally put my mag base dial indicator on the rim lip, spun it slowly & it was running out more than +.050, on 3 of the 4 rims.

American Racing said I could return them, since that was considered defective
I did & got a set of their Nitros' at that time.

Factory rims are made Hub-centric. Which is a plus compared to lug-centric.

 

That is true for the newer factory wheels, I have a brand new set of Chevy S10 Extreme Wheels that I'm going to install on my 72 Chevelle. I had to modify them from hub centric to lug centric.

 

Those ought to look very sharp on yer 72 Chevelle !!!

A fair bit of material to remove first.. cool up-grade..