How To Make Wooden Wheels With Bicycle Rims And Tyres

Wooden wheels cost a fortune to buy – but I found an easy way of making them for almost nothing. Apart from a bit of fiddly woodwork, there is a major challenge that needs overcoming for a wheelmaker – how to attach a rubber tyre. (You could in theory not bother, but everyone would hear you coming from miles away.) A rubber tyre (whether hollow or not) needs a channel to sit in, so the rim needs to be made of channel-section steel or aluminium – and that’s probably impossible to make without quite a big ring-roller.

So, I looked again at the bicycle wheel and tyre combination – and really it’s very impressive. Light and strong and cheap. But there’s a problem with the axle – it’s designed to be supported at both ends, and it will bend if you don’t. So if you’re making go carts or carriages bike wheels don’t really work. Replacing the spindle requires replacing the entire hub – which means the spokes too. So you may as well start from scratch. Which is what I’ve done.

Perhaps the key to getting these wheels tight and strong is making an accurate drawing in the first place. That way you can make all the parts accurately too, just by copying the drawing. In this case there are 8 spokes per wheel and 8 pieces that fit between them and 8 more felloes – 24 pieces, plus the hub. I made 4 wheels – so it was well worth my time to make two good templates / patterns at the start and use them to make all the 96 parts quickly and accurately.

(I looked at different numbers of spokes – and they changed the appearance of the wheel a lot. An odd number probably looks best, but I settled with 8 for simplicity.)

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