Making Wood Wheels

Who would have thought there were so many steps. Ford was turning out 
10,000 !!!! cars a day in 1925 so how did they keep up?

 

And even more fascinating the Model A

My boss bought some Chev spoked wheels ,and tried to put Ford centres in them......they just fell to pieces ........couldnt explain to him the wood wheels were held together by heavy press fit ........even bullock wagon wheels are held together by the shrinkage of the steel tyre.

Many wooden spokes for car wheels are made with tapered sides where they fit together at the hub.  The spokes are assembled alternately (one up, one down), and as the hub is pressed in, the wedge action of the tapers sliding past each other causes the spokes to tighten.  The spokes are not identical though, half need to be tapered one way, half tapered the other, as the shaft of the spoke itself is not (or should not be) perpendicular to the hub.   Once a wheel is assembled, it should have a slight concave dish, which gives the wheel considerable strength.

I have seen spokes that do not have the tapers at the hub, and they seem to always be the first type to be loose.

Brett.
 

It's amazing the amount of labour that went into a wooden wheel.

I hate to think what one would cost today, even with mass production.

Building any vehicle 80-90 years ago relied on cheap labour that worked real hard.

I'm glad I wasn't born then or I may have ended up in a similar factory.

I do not know what it costs to re-spoke a wheel today, but it wasn't all that long ago that the cost of having a set of 4 wheels re-spoked was very comparable with buying a new "flash" set of alloy wheels for a modern car..

And at the time, in my way of thinking, that made the wood spoke wheels very affordable.

Brett.

You can have your wood wheels done in Allora and new rims rolled in Kingaroy. Not cheap but reasonable for a good restoration.

Ford did not have cheap labour, he paid $5 per day for a 40 hour week which was way above other car manufacturers who paid less for longer hours. If you look at the price of a Model T it took about 5 months pay to buy one of his cars which is a bit less than it is for a base manual worker today to buy a similar family size car.

When they wrote doing 10,000 cars a day they had to make 50 000 wheels proving the car had a spare

Sankey started mass production of hollow pressed and welded steel spoked wheels for cars in 1910,and wood wheels were obsolete in England by the Great War............yet US car makers stuck with wood wheels until the late 20s.

They worked just fine. Thousands of 1920's cars still on the road with original unrestored wood spoke wheels.

It is normally the rims that rust out long before any sign of spoke failure.

The antique racing people demand wire wheels because although really strong vertically wood spokes can be stressed by side loads and it is possible they are internally damaged by a gutter strike long ago.

Lang, You mention wood wheels being built / restored in Allora. Do you have an Amish / Menonite community there??? This is the type of work they do up here in the States and Canada..