How to Make Spoked Steel Wheels- Engine Cart

have you ever been trying to set up a station engine and find wheels are a little bit hard to find or a little bit expensive well today i thought i'd show you how to make these wheels i've made about 16 of these wheels in the past for for different engines and trolleys and things like that and they're actually pretty easy to make all you need's a welder a cut-off saw angle grinder and a few other bits and pieces and a little bit of time takes two hours to make each one of these wheels so i'll just walk you around and show you these wheels a little bit closer and then we'll get started on showing you how to make them so i think these wheels have actually come up really nice this is a bit of 325 mil pipe it's six centimeters wide across the width of it here and the spokes are 32 mil by six and i'll show you how i cut those all up in a few minutes but i've just put a bit of rubber car tire here just to make them a little bit smoother to ride on it's interesting i might even make another um video at some stage showing you how i make up these turntables they're pretty easy to make as well i've got some more wheels here these ones i've just allowed to go rusty i've got them on this sort of a garden wagon another really good example of how easy it is to make up some simple wheels with a bit of steel that you can get from a scrap yard okay here's our length of pipe and just take a look at the measurement of it yeah about 325 millimeters and as i said it's six mil thick don't know if you've seen one of these little uh devices before made by empire founded in the local hardware store and you can just put them on your steel ruler and undo this little nut here and slide it all the way down that way you can get a constant depth on whatever it is that you're wanting to measure really good for making the spokes but so what i do is i just put it on here and i mark the depth and i do that all the way around and i do it on maybe six or eight different places then i get a piece of cardboard or paper and i wrap it around and then that gives me a perfect 100 circle guided by these pencil marks and i can then draw a pencil line all the way around okay i think we've got that that looks fairly good let's uh roll this over and start cutting [Music] um [Music] okay so we've got it cut off we might just uh run the grinder around it just quickly and then we'll run a wire brush with an angle grinder on it as well just to clean it up so we've got a good surface to weld on okay we've got the four inch angle grinder we'll just run it around the edge around here on both sides and around the outside just to give it a bit of a smooth edge to start with okay so we've got the the edge uh smooth now we'll hook the wire brush up on the other angle grinder and we'll get this all cleaned up get the rust off so we've got some nice edge okay so we've got some nice smooth edges now ready to for us to weld but uh i'll use the belt sander on here now just to get a nice surface on the edge okay so we've got a pretty nice smooth edge now smooth on the outside smooth on the inside okay here's a good example of how to use this sliding attachment to the ruler the hubs in the center of the wheel are going to be 900 so we just undo that screw slide it down to 900 tighten him up get our bit of pipe there's the hub for our wheel okay we've got our axle hub again and just need to clean it up a little bit so again got the belt sander on the bench [Music] okay we'll just run a file through the inside to clean those burrs out [Music] okay we've got our our flat strap here in the cutoff saw it's 32 mil by six i've got my sliding steel ruler adjusted at 13 and a half millimeters so we'll cut these spokes off and see if they fit nice and tight okay so we've got that adjusted we'll tighten it up [Music] one [Applause] okay we'll go and put these two spokes on the belt sander and get these rough edges taken off and then we'll try and put them in the wheel and see if they're nice and firm okay so this is the wheel we're going to try and end up with it's a pretty nice wheel it's got six spokes so i'll show you how we go about marking out the spokes so we get them evenly spaced okay we're going to go ahead and mark out the spacing of the spokes on our new rim now when i made this wheel i divided the circumference by 6 and that gave me a measurement that i could then transfer onto my calipers and that got it pretty close first time around i did go around and and mark them with the texture just so that by the time i got around to the last spoke the measurement was exactly the same so sometimes i had to rub them out a little bit just to get them into the right spot i've already gone around with the calipers with this rim and i've marked them and i've then put the center punch in and given them a tap so that i've got a mark there that's easy to see when i come to do the welding now to reliably and accurately make these wheels i've made up a small table it's real just made out of a bit of form ply and a bit of mdf on the top look you could make it out of steel top but i find that using an arc welder with the the splatter from the welding you end up with little dilbries on the surface and that can make it difficult for placement of spokes so i find they don't burn i've done lots of wheels before and the timber doesn't burn so i've found that that's a good way to go so how this works is you get your rim you might turn this around you get your rim i've got this little bracket over the top we've got our uh hub and we put the hub in the middle and we now pin that down with this little lever so that holds it down nice and firm we can then get we can then get our engineers square and just make sure that it is level i mean it has actually been cut level on the cutoff saw and the table is level so it's going to be fairly close straight away but if it is a little bit out you can just change the pressure from one side to another or just move the bottom but look so far that looks alright won't know until we start putting the spokes in so here's the six spokes that i've cut and they're all cut and hopefully will fit nicely before i start fitting the spokes i've got these little metal blocks and what i do is i put them inside the wheel so that i can sit the spokes on top of those and that gives that measurement of the offset of the spokes the distance out from here so it gives you a nice even distance with no error so what we can do now is we can start sliding our spokes in and giving that a little bit of a an adjustment because i don't have it centered let's see if we can just move the rim just move keep moving until we can get it nice and firm and we just keep going around i'll put four spokes in to start with and that will make sure that the wheel is centered and then i can start welding so we'll just get four spokes in and then we can get some magnetic squares in there just to hold each of those spokes straight okay so now i have a v square so that i can actually just run this because these work really well on uh pipe to make sure that you're running a line straight across so if i just sit that on there and i've got my center punch dot here i need to get it into the center of the axle hub so now i can just adjust that slightly and i'll now put a weld on that to get that one set and we'll go on from there i need to put some clamps to make sure that as i weld the rim stays firmly positioned and i can see the moment i clamp that down that came up a little bit there so we'll put plants all the way around and that will hold everything nicely and firmly in place okay so that's that's got that one just lightly uh take welded in now we just put our v-square across that again just to make sure that it is looking straight in actual fact we might also tack the spoke on the other side so i can see that knees there we go so we'll just tack this spoke now okay we can now look across this wheel and see just by eye whether the spoke looks right now that one there that one looks perfect this second spoke does look as if it needs a bit of a tap so we'll just double check that yeah so that looks good so we'll go ahead now and weld the other side of each of those spokes in and then we can move on to the next spoke okay so now we can take our squares out because they those spokes will now be set there and now we can work on our second set of spokes so we've just got to now move our our little chocks and our spoke around to the next center punched mark and we'll put a magnetic square in there to hold that in place we might move our earth around a little bit we'll get our next spoke we'll line up with another okay so we can see or i can see that not quite scented okay we'll get these next spokes tucked in we'll get our v-square and this should be sitting in there that i don't need to worry too much about that but i can see that this needs to go over put the v square back on slide it around i might have gone just a tiny little bit too far just double check again maybe still just a little bit too far that looks good i'll tack that spoke in there okay now we'll get our v square and we'll just take a look at this next spoke okay well we're already now up to we've just got to make sure that we don't have the little welding spots on our chocks because that will create a difficulty [Music] okay so that's the the technical part of the wheel done now realistically we can just uh take all our clamps off and then now it's just a case of sitting it on the bench and welding it all up so we've we've done all the hard work we can now take it out of our our bracket so now we're just going to go around and we'll tack weld all of these spokes on this side and then we'll get stuck into welding each of the spokes on nice and firmly so okay now just to try and get this wheel cleaned up a little bit we're going to use a cordless drill with a nice little wire brush on the end and we'll just run it around all the welds and just clean everything up so it has nice finished look to it [Music] [Music] okay our wheels come up pretty well i'll just bring him up closer so you can have a look so it's all welded up really nice in fact this wheel now is realistically uh ready for undercoat paint this might be a couple of little uh welding deliveries still on there but it's actually a really nice wheel so really pleased with how that's coming what i uh do is i get a bit of color bond flashing off off the shed and i slide that inside the axle hub and it creates it for one it takes up uh any slack that or slop that might be in the hole so once i get the flashing inside i can then slide my axle in it's a nice firm fit let's let's give it a spin and just see how it rolls let's get it lined up with the camera a little bit better okay so here's the finished wheel it's come out really nicely it's taken about two hours to make hasn't cost a lot few tools involved i hope my video might help you if you've been looking to make a wheel and not sure how to go about it it's pretty simple anyway hope you had some success with your wheels and catch you in the next video

Channel: Waterloo Creek

Views: 20,904

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Id: HrbxS_QhPog

Length: 26min 3sec (1563 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 02 2021