Beside the outfit in Japan (Kustomwheel.com), is there any other place, in the states, selling the old 60's era Mickey Thompson single rib, 5 spoke Rader or Radir wheels, like the picture of the rusted out piece. They had a chrome rim with aluminum spokes. I do not like the tri-rib version offered by varios vendors. Any info out there? Thanks.
Wheel I want has a single rib down the center only with smooth rounded edges like the picture. Those are tri-ribs with squared off flat edges on the 55.
Rocket wheels like in the link above are single rib style, but not very good duplicates of the original Raders. These new ones are solid aluminum castings with squarer edges on the spoke edges. No one makes aluminum spoke/steel rim original style wheels. I found 15x6 originals for my Mysterion clone but Dave Shuten had to use the modern version on his. Roth's View attachment 4585222 Dave's Mine
Posted my buddy's 32 Essex on the "other" 32 thread.... Close enough for the girl's I hangout with... Disclaimer: perhaps these are the Rice version?
I am almost certain that the wheel I am looking for is on the Japanese web site. Go to site Kustomwheel.com and page marked wheels Unlimited shows. Click on M.T. icon and page with wheels shows up. On right side column, 4 wheels down is what appears to be the wheel I had back then. How they ended up there...?? I did read somewhere that the stock of wheels from the 60's ended up in a warehouse in New Jersey after the company went under. What company, I don't know. When I bought my set long ago, Mickey Thompson was involved.
I had to drill out those rivets to remove the web so I could reverse the old Raders to duplicate Roth's on the Mysterion. That's what Ed had to do also as he reports in one of his books. Rader also did it for customers since his manufacturer only assembled them with shallow rim out. Those rivets are HARD!!!. I ruined half a dozen carbide tipped drill bits in the process. Reassembled with button head grade 8 screws. OK for a show car that won't be driven much if at all. They used a good aluminum alloy in the originals. Here is one of the webs I removed after just a couple minutes on the polishing wheel after 50 or so years of grime and oxidation. They made the single rib, dual rib and Sears Roebuck no-rib versions.
The picture of the wheel taken apart is the wheel I had. Chrome steel rim with aluminum spokes riveted together.
The Radir wheel story is very interesting. Defining The Hot Rod And Custom Car Legacy Wheels Part 3: Composite And Modular Wheels By Chris Shelton, Photography by Petersen Publishing Archives, Hot Rod Staff, Chris Shelton, Car Craft Staff Rod & Custom, December 03, 2013 Inspired by his gearhead students’ aspirations to own then-exotic American Racing wheels, high school shop class teacher and Bonneville racer Dick Beith got an idea to reinvent the wheel itself. “I thought about it and the only difference between a mag wheel and a stock wheel is the center, or the spider as they called it,” he says. “So I thought, if I just made a center piece and put it in a steel rim I’d have the look for way less.” Fenton, manufacturer of everything from manifolds to shifters, produced the Road Runner, a wheel that resembles the first Wheel Centre Co. wheel but with “webbed” spokes. Radir Wheel began reproducing it as a one-piece aluminum casting in 1995 and still offers it today. And that’s exactly what he did. “I made the wooden patterns in the shop class after school and had a foundry make the castings,” he continues. Though he didn’t realize it at the time, the zinc-rich Tenzaloy 713 that the foundry used came to define the alloy wheel market in the ’60s: it cast well, polished to a magnesium-like shine, and achieved 80 percent of the strength of 356-T6 aluminum but without the costly heat-treating process. “The silly thing is that name later became the nickname for the wheel,” he recalls. “‘Hey, he’s got Tenzaloys on it!’ they’d say.” Beith acquired the rims by cutting the centers out of OEM wheels, welding the rivet holes shut and grinding them smooth, and having the same shop that polished the centers also plate the rims. “We drilled the spokes and the rim and bolted them together,” he says. Wheel Centre Co. and the composite wheel were born. Wheel Centre Co.’s most famous wheels are its E-T variants. These were also cast as a one-piece aluminum wheel but the most common variant is a die-cast face that has an integral steel ring that welds to a steel rim. The Fenton Ram Rod, Mickey Thompson MK-II, and JC Penney Foremost resemble these but have peaked spokes. “I made four wheels and put ’em on one of my students’ cars,” he continues. “We went to the Oakland Roadster Show on set up night and found a guy who had plain steel wheels on his car. ‘Hey, you wanna swap wheels for the show?’ I asked him. We jacked up his car on the show floor and ours in the parking lot and swapped wheels. Then I went down and had some brochures printed and handed them out.” The brochures worked probably better than he anticipated. “Dick Rader chased me down and said, ‘Hey, you got a good idea; let’s get together.’ Instead he went to L.A. and teamed up with Mickey Thompson and away they went.” (More on that later.) Though Wheel Centre Co. later produced all aluminum wheels, it pioneered another notable composite design. “One-piece wheels are really expensive and time intensive and we were always back ordered,” he says. So he came up with another center design that had a false aluminum “lip”. “It disguised the whole rim part; it looked like a one-piece aluminum rim,” he notes. And by having a steel ring cast in the outer perimeter of the casting it could be quickly welded to a steel rim. “We could squirt those out real fast,” he enthuses. Rader, Mickey Thompson, and Wheel Corp of America The recently revived Rocket Racing Wheels brand produces a similar one-piece aluminum variant of the original Rader. Rather than taper to an end, the spokes merge into a raised center-cap boss. You could say Dick Rader was destined to build wheels. Wheel is in his name after all (räder is plural for wheel in German). According to Rich Conklin at Radir Wheels (no relation), Rader began producing wheels by at least 1962 and possibly 1961. The Single Rib as Rader called it featured five flat spokes, each adorned with, well, a single rib down the middle. · Wheel Corp of America referred to the original single-rib Rader as the DBR-100R (polished) or DBR-100S or SPC (satin). A former Wheel Corp dealer, Trans Am knocked off this design in the later ’60s. Radir Wheels produces a very faithful looking one-piece U.S.-made aluminum version of this wheel. · Wheel Corp machined the faces of the 100-series wheels to create the DBR-300M, also known as the Monte Carlo. The similar DBR-500D has a perimeter ring cast where the center meets the rim. Both date to at least 1964, if not 1963. · The DBR-600S featured four spokes and, because it had an undefined center, could take any bolt pattern regardless of lug count. Good luck finding them, though; they were uncommon even half a century ago. But now you know what they are if you find any. In 1965 Mickey Thompson touted five new wheels in its Challenger line, among them the three-rib wheel that it referred to as the Mag Alloy Type or Mag Type No. 1, depending on the advertisement. As Beith mentioned, Rader teamed up with the highly competitive Mickey Thompson. Producing wheels in Long Beach under the name Wheel Corp of America, they produced an incalculable number of wheels in what almost seems like as many styles. A promoter at heart, Thompson brought an intense level of marketing sophistication to bear on the wheel world. Wheel Corp wheels appeared everywhere, including the two most widely seen places in the ’60s: on the Batmobile and in Sears catalogs. Like other wheel designs, they also appeared as knock-offs. Speed Engineering produced a version of the single-rib. Former distributor Trans American Products in nearby Long Beach produced a copy that it called the Radar. Even the model number is an anagram of Rader’s.
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