Rimbellisher

Rimbellisher (pronounced rhim-bell-lysh)

A decorative ring attached to the rim of a car's wheel.

1940s: A portmanteau word, the construct being rim +‎ (em)bellish +-er and originally a trademarked brand of the Ace company.  Rim was from the tenth century Middle English rim, rym & rime, from the Old English rima (rim, edge, border, bank, coast), from the Proto-Germanic rimô & rembô (edge, border), from the primitive Indo-European rem- & remə- (to rest, support, be based).   It was cognate with the Saterland Frisian Rim (plank, wooden cross, trellis), the Old Saxon rimi (edge; border; trim) and the Old Norse rimi (raised strip of land, ridge).  Rim generally means “an edge around something, especially when circular” and is used in fields a different as engineering and vulcanology.  The use in political geography is an extension of the idea, something like “PacRim” (Pac(ific) + rim) used to group the nations with coastlines along the Pacific Ocean.  The use in print journalism referred to “a semicircular copydesk”.   The special use in metallurgy described the outer layer of metal in an ingot where the composition was different from that of the centre.  The word rim is an especially frustrating one for golfers to hear because it describes the ball rolling around the rim of the hole but declining to go in.

Embellish dates from the early fourteenth century and was from the Middle English embelisshen from the Anglo-French, from the Middle French embeliss- (stem of embelir), the construct being em- (The form taken by en- before the labial consonants “b” & “p”, as it assimilates place of articulation).  The en- prefix was from the Middle English en- & in-.  In the Old French it existed as en- & an-, from the Latin in- (in, into); it was also from an alteration of in-, from the Middle English in-, from the Old English in- (in, into), from the Proto-Germanic in (in).  Both the Latin and Germanic forms were from the primitive Indo-European en (in, into) and the frequency of use in the Old French is because of the confluence with the Frankish an- intensive prefix, related to the Old English on-.) + bel-, from the Latin bellus (pretty) + -ish.  The –ish suffix was from the Middle English –ish & -isch, from the Old English –isċ, from the Proto-West Germanic -isk, from the Proto-Germanic –iskaz, from the primitive Indo-European -iskos.  It was cognate with the Dutch -s; the German -isch (from which Dutch gained -isch), the Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish -isk & -sk, the Lithuanian –iškas, the Russian -ский (-skij) and the Ancient Greek diminutive suffix -ίσκος (-ískos); a doublet of -esque and -ski.  There exists a welter of synonyms and companion phrases such as decorate, grace, prettify, bedeck, dress up, exaggerate, gild, overstate, festoon, embroider, adorn, spiff up, trim, magnify, deck, color, enrich, elaborate, ornament, beautify, enhance, array & garnish.  Embellish is a verb, embellishing is a noun & verb, embellished is a verb & adjective and embellisher & embellishment are nouns; the noun plural is embellishments.

The –er suffix was from the Middle English –er & -ere, from the Old English -ere, from the Proto-Germanic -ārijaz, thought most likely to have been borrowed from the Latin –ārius where, as a suffix, it was used to form adjectives from nouns or numerals.  In English, the –er suffix, when added to a verb, created an agent noun: the person or thing that doing the action indicated by the root verb.   The use in English was reinforced by the synonymous but unrelated Old French –or & -eor (the Anglo-Norman variant -our), from the Latin -ātor & -tor, from the primitive Indo-European -tōr.  When appended to a noun, it created the noun denoting an occupation or describing the person whose occupation is the noun.  Rimbellisher is a noun and the noun plural is rimbellishers.  All other forms are non-standard but a wheel to which a rimbellisher has been fitted could be said to be rimbellished (adjective) white the person doing the fitting would be a rimbellisher (noun), the process an act of rimbellishing (verb) and the result a rimbellishment (noun).

Jaguar XK120 with wire wheels (left), with hubcaps (centre) and with hubcaps and rimbellishers (right).

The Jaguar XK range (1948-1961) was available either with solid or wire wheels and while the choice was usually on aesthetic grounds, those using the things in competition sometimes had to assess the trade-offs.  The wire wheels were lighter and provided better cooling of the brakes (especially those connected to the rear wheels which were covered with fender skirts (spats) when the steel wheels were fitted.  In many forms of motor sport that was of course a great advantage but the spokes and the deletion of the skirts came at an aerodynamic cost, the additional drag induced by the combination reducing top speed by a up to 5 mph (8 km/h) and increasing fuel consumption.  It was thus a question of working out what was most valued and in the early days, where regulations permitted, some drivers used wire-wheels at the front and retained the skirts at the rear, attempting to get as much as possible of the best of both worlds (the protrusion of the hubs used on the wire wheels precluded them from fitting behind the skirts).  Jaguar XK owners would never refer to their wheels as “rims” although there may be some who have added “rims” to their modern (post Tata ownership) Jaguars.

Hofit Golan (b 1985) and Lindsay Lohan (b 1986) attending Summer Tour Maserati in Porto Cervo, Sardinia, July 2016.  The Maserati Quattroporte is a 1964 Series I, fitted with steel wheels and rimbellishers.

Among certain classes, it’s now common to refer to wheels as rims, and the flashier the product, the more likely it is to be called a “rim”.  Good taste is of course subjective but as a general rule, the greater the propensity to being described as a rim, the more likely it is to be something in poor taste.  That’s unless it actually is a rim, some wheels being of multi-part construction where the rim is a separate piece (and composed sometimes from a different metal).  In the early days of motoring this was the almost universal method of construction and it persisted in trucks until relatively recently (although still used in heavy, earth-moving equipment and such).  However, those dealing with the high-priced, multi-pieced wheels seem still to call them wheels and use the term “rim” only when discussing the actual rim component.

1937 Rolls-Royce Phantom III four-door cabriolet with coachwork by German house Voll Ruhrbeck, fitted with the standard factory wire wheels (left) and 1937 Rolls-Royce Phantom III fixed head coupé (FHC) with coachwork by Belgium house Vesters et Neirinck, fitted with the “Ace Deluxe” wheel discs which fitted over the standard factory wire wheels (right).  The coupé, fabricated in Brussels, was unusual in pre-war coachbuilding in that there was no B-pillar, the style which would become popular in the US between the 1950s-1970s where in two & four-door form it would be described as a “hardtop”, the nomenclature which would over the years be sometimes confused with the “hard-tops” sometime supplied with convertibles as a more secure alternative to the usual “soft top”.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the first known instance of rimbellisher in print was in The Motor (1903-1988) magazine in 1949 although they seem first to have been so-described when on sale in England in 1948.  The rimbellishers were a new product for the Ace Company which in the 1930s had specialized in producing disk-like covers for wire-wheels.  That might seem strange because wire wheels are now much admired but in the 1930s many regarded them as old-fashioned although their light-weight construction meant they were often still used.  What Ace’s aluminium covers provided was the advantage of the lighter weight combined with a shiny, modernist look and they were also easy to keep clean, unlike wire wheels which could demand hours each month to maintain.

The Ace company's publicity material from the 1950s.

In the post-war years the rimbellishers became popular because they were a detail which added a “finished” look.  They were a chromed ring which attached inside the rim of the wheel, providing a contrasting band between the tyre and the centre of the wheel, partially covered usually by a hubcap.  Ace’s original Rimbellishers were secured using a worm-drive type of fastening which ensured the metal of the wheel suffered no damage but as other manufacturers entered the market, the trend became to use a cheaper method of construction using nothing more than multiple sprung tags and with the devices push-fitted into the well of the wheel, some scraping of the paint being inevitable.  Rimbellisher (always with an initial capital) was a registered trademark of the Ace company but the word quickly became generic and was in the 1950s & 1960s used to describe any similar device.  Interestingly, by the mid 1950s, Ace ceased to use “rimbellisher” in its advertising copy and described the two ranges as “wheel discs” and “wheel trims”.

The early versions did nothing more than produce a visual effect but the stylists couldn’t resist the opportunities and some rimbellishers grew to the extent they completely blocked the flow of air through the vents in the wheels and that adversely affected the cooling of the brakes, the use of some of the new generation of full-wheel covers also having this consequence.  The solution was to ensure there was some airflow but to maintain as much as possible of the visual effect, what were often added were little fins and for these to work properly, they needed to catch the airflow so there were left and right-side versions, an idea used to this day in the alloy wheels of some high-price machinery.

1969 Pontiac GTO with standard trim rings (left) and 1969 Pontiac GTO Judge supplied without trim rings (right).

Ace in the early 1950s had distributers in the US and both their rimbellishers and full-wheel covers were offered.  They took advantage of the design which enabled the same basic units to be used, made specific only the substitution of a centre emblem which was varied to suit different manufacturers.  Ace’s market penetration for domestic vehicles didn’t last because Detroit soon began producing their own and within a short time they were elaborate and often garish, something which would last into the twenty-first century.  The Americans soon forgot about the rimbellisher name and started calling them trim-rings and they became a feature of the steel “sports wheels” manufacturers offered on their high-performance ranges in the years before aluminium wheels became mainstream products.  The trim-rings of course had a manufacturing cost and this was built into the price when the wheels were listed as an option.  The cost of production wouldn’t have been great but interestingly, when General Motors’ Pontiac division developed the “Judge” option for its GTO to compete with the low-cost Plymouth Road Runner, the trim-rings were among the items deleted.  However, the Judge package evolved to the point where it became an extra-cost option for the GTO with the missing trim-rings about the only visible concession to economy.

Mercedes-Benz W111s: 1959 220 SE with 8-slot rimbellishers (left), 1967 250 SE with the briefly used solid rimbellishers (centre) and 1971 280 SE 3.5 with the later 12-slot rimbellishers which lacked the elegance of the 8-slots.

Like many companies, Mercedes-Benz used wheel covers as a class identifier.  When the W111 saloons (1959-1968) were released in 1959, the entry-level 220 was fitted with just hubcaps while the up market twin-carburetor 220 S and the fuel-injected 220 SE had rimbellishers (made by the factory, not Ace).  Within a few years, the use of rimbellishers was expanded but by the mid-1960s, the elegant 8-slot units mostly had been replaced with a less-pleasing solid metal pressing (albeit one which provided a gap for brake cooling).  That didn’t last and phased-in between 1967-1968, the company switched from the hubcap / rimbellisher combination to a one-piece wheel cover which included the emulation of a 12-slot rimbellisher.  There were no objections to the adoption of one-piece construction but few found the new design as attractive as the earlier 8-slot.

MG publicity photograph (left) showing MGA and Magnettes, the former fitted with the Ace Rimbellishers which were a factory option.  The MGA (right) uses a third-party rimbellisher which was physically bigger and overlapped the edge of the rim to a greater degree.  The factory versions are preferred by most because they better suit the MGA's delicate lines.

MGA Coupé (left) with the rare Ace Mercury Wheel Discs (right).

Rarely seen however are the Ace Mercury Wheel Discs which were at various times a factory option also on the ZA-ZB Magnettes (1953-1958), MGB (1962-1980) and Midget (1961-1979).  The Ace Mercury was not exclusive to the MG range and was widely available from aftermarket suppliers in a variety of sizes and all that distinguished the MG units was that Ace supplied them to the factory with an octagon-shaped MG centre badge.  Some have been seen with a (fake) eared spinner in the style of a knockoff nut but these were never available from the factory.  The Mercury was made from bright anodized aluminium and thus was both lightweight and corrosion-resistant but somewhat fragile if subjected to stresses which which steel would easily cope.  The small louvers operate as air scoops when the wheels are rotating, pulling in cooling air and directing it through the holes in the wheel to assist in cooling the brakes; the set of four was thus supplied in left & right-hand pairs and needed to be installed with the louvers’ open edge “facing the breeze”.  The design was changed in 1959 when the wheels were revised and at the same time the Rimbellishers were deleted from the option list because they no longer fitted the new wheels (although third-party rimbellishers could still be used).

1966 Jaguar Mark X with factory rimbellishers.