Wheel Building

The wheel tee rings are aluminium castings I had to get a local engineering company to finish turn them, my lathe was to small to do the job, the spokes and strakes are fixed with copper rivets.
I cut all the spokes to shape by hand I made a jig for the milling machine and in batches of five I finished the final profile with a milling cutter.

The wheel building jig is a piece of plywood with a steel spigot to locate the hub, and small blocks of wood screwed to the board locate the rims concentric to the hub, the rims are held by hook bolts to the board.

The spokes are bent to fit flat on the tee ring and into the milled housings in the hubs, the spokes must lay on the tee ring and in the hub housings with no spring, I fixed the spokes at the tee rings temporally with bolts and nuts, the hub end of the spokes was fastened with counter sunk set screws.

Once I had the wheel temporary assembled I checked it for true running, I found that if a spoke had any spring or the bend not set right, when bolted down tight it would cause the wheel to be out of true, that meant removing the fixing bolts in each spoke to find any that needed the bend adjusted, a time consuming job but necessary for a true running wheel.

Once I had a true running wheel I removed one bolt at a time and replaced it with a rivet, the set screws holding the spoke at the hub housing were removed and treated with Loctite and re fitted.

I cut all the strakes by hand, and again made a jig for the milling machine and finished the end angle with the milling cutter, the strakes have a helical twist I did this by nipping one end of the strake in the vice and using a smooth jaw adjustable spanner to grip the other end of the strake I pulled the twist into the strake, I found that after the first one or two strakes I could get the twist just about right and needing very little adjustment to get a good fit over the rim.

Building the wheels are a time consuming job and it was one of the first jobs I did when I started the Marshall.