HRE on that almost 4 year old thread you kindly linked us to:
Dirty Mac,

First, I cannot understate how sorry I am to see you are having a problem with your HRE wheels. While I should probably wait to get the whole story again on Monday morning, I know a little background and I know how HRE would and should be approaching this. Let me clarify our intention so you don't misunderstand what we're trying to do.

1. Our warranty when these wheels were sold was indeed 5 years, but at the end of the day, if this were due to HRE we would stand behind them 100% no matter how long it was and our wheels sold today today carry a lifetime structural warranty because we realized that is what we were doing anyway so we might as well make it official.

2. We do not guarantee any warranty without first inspecting the wheels. Upon inspection it was clear these wheels were taken apart and powdercoated by a 3rd party as they did not leave the HRE factory that color. We track all of our wheels using serial numbers so we know the original order and any modification by a 3rd party voids the warranty because we cannot control their process.

3. Repainting seems innocent enough but it doesn't take much to overheat and damage a forged center. We see people claiming they do it all the time without issues but I can assure you that it is only a matter of time and miles before the centers start to crack once they've been overheated. A difference of 50 degrees F is the difference between safely powdercoating and severe degradation of the parts. The vendor doesn't know because fatigue failures take time. Once it finally cracks, the customer is LONG gone (in this case the car was already sold). And you are correct, the thickness has nothing to do with the degradation. It just stood out to us as different than HRE's quality and why we checked to see if we did the finish.

4. We asked for your other 3 wheels so we could see if we could replace just the centers and determine the full price of the quote as rims may or may not need to be replaced (bent or other reasons). This is not BS and was intended to get you down the road as inexpensively as possible. We were never intending to sell you 4 new wheels and I had authorized a significant discount on the entire order understanding you basically bought someone else's ruined wheels which are now junk. All of this is tentative on sending the wheels to HRE which I'm sure you understand is not unreasonable as we're trying to actually save you money.

5. I also ask that you try to understand our position as this is something I have personally been warning people about on 6Speed and elsewhere time and time again. You should NEVER modify an HRE wheel. Send it to us. You will be taken care of properly and safely. I know you bought these used and didn't do the mods, but you are basically stuck with the aftermath. Unfortunately, this is not the first time we've seen this and we've recently had another incident where an authorized dealer did unauthorized painting after it left our factory with the same end result. We cannot restate enough how important this is but unfortunately even some of our partners don't listen and we have cut off one dealer just for this reason.

6. At the end of the day, HRE's name is on those wheels and you're unhappy. Our intention is and will always be to take care of you as best possible even though the warranty was voided due to damage by a 3rd party. I hope you realize that this level of service is not common in this industry or any industry for that matter. You have HREs and that means there is a promise that goes along with that and I hope you can see we're trying to always uphold that promise. I hope and assume we will work this out to your satisfaction and I hope I have clarified our intentions regarding this issue.

Please be careful out there.