PHOTO: DAVE MITCHELL
Stew Meyers’ foam vintage wheels (above left) feature triangular balsa gussets that support the hub. After forming the tire, a paper wheel cover is glued in place over the gussets, creased radially just enough to give the impression of
desired wheel, you can capture the foam blank between these washers and use them as a template for initial truing up of the wheel. This is especially useful if you are trying to turn thin vintage wheels with a larger diameter—they will help hold the foam square to the machine screw.
Wheel old
Now that the topic of thin vintage wheels has come up, they present their own chal- lenges. Among those are how to keep the hub secure—a length of aluminum tube glued into a thin foam (or even balsa) disc is not going to last through too many rough landings!
Stew Meyers likes to glue up a series of light balsa triangles arranged radially around the hub, and then cover these with a domed paper wheel cover that is pre-creased to suggest spokes. In the same manner that a few tread lines go a long way towards sug- gesting a fully treaded tire, the use of a dozen or so creases in the paper wheel cover does the trick nicely to suggest a WWI era spoked wheel.
Note that it is not necessary to have the same number of glued-in support triangle as there are creases in the domed cover. Once the triangles and dome are dry, the tire can be shaped as discussed above.
Wheel easy
Okay, let’s say you’re not satisfied with sug- gesting spokes—you want the real thing! Well, you could visit
www.hobbyspecialties.com and have Alan Cohen make you up a pair of excel- lent balsa or foam wheels.
Alan has taken up where the late Fulton Hungerford left off. His work is first rate, and very reasonably priced. Alan’s stan- dard wheels feature 36 spokes and are available in a range of diameters. While you are at his site, be sure to check out his other fine products!
Wheel leave it at this
Maybe you are a real glutton for punish- ment, or you just must have wheels with 80 spokes. Care to make them yourself? This is the track Enrique Maltz takes with the cus- tom spoked wheels he makes for his indoor models.
At the heart of Enrique’s system is a spoke
lacing jig, with brad nails arranged equally around the perimeter of a circle that is com- fortably larger than the largest wheel he in- tends to ever make. The jig is numbered and marked to guide the lacing process. One half of the pins serve the inner spokes, one half serve the outer. A center hole is drilled to ac- cept a hub, made from two concentric pieces of aluminum.
PHOTO: ENRIQUE MALTZ
spokes. A close-up (above right) of the custom brass cutter that Enrique uses to shape his foam tires, which are cut from common foam food trays. A light touch is essential!
The outer tube is cut to the desired length to establish the width of the hub; the inner tube extends long on both sides, creating a stepped edge at the outer hub ends. This stepped edge serves as the hub flange to which the spokes will be seated and glued.
Enrique makes a custom cutting tool out of brass, which he chucks into a drill press and uses to ever so gently cut out four tire halves, two for each wheel, out of foam food trays. One tire half is arranged profile side down within a sub-jig that supports the delicate foam tire, and allows it to be centered secure- ly within the jig and raised up off the table by the amount appropriate to create a slight “dome” on the wheel’s inner side. The spokes are laced in two parts, first the inner and then the outer, following a mysti- cal formula developed by the Mayans 1500 years ago and now entrusted only to a hand- ful of obsessive scholars, mathematicians, and modelers. A single piece of thread or monofilament is used for each half. Once the spokes are in place, the other foam tire half is glued in place, securing the ends of the spokes. When everything is dry, the wheel is cut away from the jig, the thread ends are trimmed back to the tire, and the end result is ready for painting. Nothing to it!
PHOTOS: ENRIQUE MALTZ
This picture of Enrique’s spoke-threading jig conveys the methodical process by which the spoked wheels are created. Each half of the spokes is created with a single thread that is run according to the numbers at the perimeter of the jig.
FLYING MODELS
The finished product! This pair of wheels weighs less than .5 grams, and is best suited for indoor models. A similar process can be used for more robust balsa wheels for outdoor models, such as those made by Alan Cohen.
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