Bottman;
I regularly deal with site developers and their contractors. If this guy wants to get cute, filing a claim will cost me lunch for one of the attorneys that I deal with regularly. If he replaces the rims I will settle for that. If not, there will be litigation for the cost of the rims, the cost of the 3rd party balance, the cost of the 4th party load force balancing, the cost of my PTO used up to deal with all this stuff, court filing costs, legal costs, and whatever else I can think of. Then there will be complaints to the Better Business Bureau, Tire Rack (installer was one of their recommended installers), and the tire dealership franchise. I don't really want to go there but, in Harry's words, "go ahead, make my day".
Drizzojh:
I had vibrations under braking, but not in the steering wheel. Brake guy (also tire installer) pulled the rears and told me that there were signs of overheating which I was told could have warped the drums and caused the vibration. If this is true, I could probably attribute it to several firewood runs in the heat of the summer where I had a 625 lb u-haul trailer (no brakes) loaded with 1500 lb of wood with another several hundred pounds of wood in the bed and 2 people in the cab going through the hilliest terrain in the state on NJ. On one of the runs I did notice that something felt a little "different" near the end of the hilly part. The new rotors solved that problem.
The kicker is that the place who did the brakes and the tires reportedly has a Load Force Balancer. If this is true, he could have saved everybody grief, effort, and cost of replacing the tires by simply owning up and replaced the rims. Instead, he took the cheap way out hoping it was the tires where this didn't seem likely because they were Continentals, not some off-brand.