Are there any shops out there that will take the center out of an old locking rim wheel and weld it into a new rim? I'm not talking the firestone widow makers but the safer style with the "C" clip around the outer rim. I'm looking at a vintage bus project and of course it has 5 lug split rims on it...
I doubt it. The liability stops most of them. The local machine shop here will redrill bolt patterns, and will NOT touch any other work dealing with the contstruction of a wheel.
Their is a company called wheels now in Waukesha Wi.1-800-782-5145ask for Cory he just hooker us up with new ones for a divco milk truck. the fronts are new the backare the old ones . Tell him the pineapple boys sent you.
Back in the late 60's and early 70's we used to go down to the Junior college and put wheels in a lath and cut the outer rim off and roll a band and weld it onto the wheel along with the piece we cut off. We would use a dial indicator to make sure the finished product turned true. We would also drill out the rivets and turn the wheel inside out and line up the drilled out rivet holes and weld up the rims again using a dial indicator to make sure they ran true. Never heard of one failing and a lot were used by the jeep boys off road. I would do it today if I had access to a large lath but not for anyone else. The biggest criteria here is your welding skill and proper prep of the wheel.
There are some guys doing that specifically for Dodge Power Wagons. There are also a lot of guys running the split rim wheels with no problems.
I saw those but they would look really out of place on the old bus... I'm saving them as a last resort. Good to know that you can at least get something!
Nice! ...and close too! I sent them a message so we'll see what they can do. I've thought about running them... there's so much bad info out there mostly (from the Firestone RH-5's) that it makes you think the tires are going to jump off the rims, come around a corner, and take your head off from 1/2 mile away.
Yes and yes , they made a big difference in the handling on the milk truck. The guy in the commercial tire place we got them from said they would be the steering tires on a semi.
The truck on the right is running 20" radials on split ring wheels. You probably don't want military mud tires on your bus, but if these exist, there might be other treads available as well.
Yes, so if you weld on a one-piece rim, the tire size must be bigger than 20". The bottom of the new drop-center will be 20", so the new rim will need to be 22 or 24"-something like that. I think that's how it worked on the Divco above. They started out with 16' rims and went up to 19.5". Of course, they used new centers, so they probably could have gone smaller as long as is still cleared the brakes. I think the Power Wagon conversions are going from 16" split rims to 16.5" drop center rims.
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