A weal of wheels

Progress is really starting to pick up. We'll that is a little disingenuous. I'm spending about the same amount of time each week working on my tin beast; but instead of primarily cutting out stuff, I am instead mostly assembling various components from the stuff that has been already cut out. Gives the appearance of being more productive I suppose. It certainly is more gratifying. I also have two video updates to share. That is mostly caused from just being lazy and not updating my blog. :)

Let's get started with the drive sprockets. As of right now, I am not 100% satisfied with how they have turned out. All of my dissatisfaction revolves around the center cones. Since they are very important to the drive sprocket, I chose to have a machine shop roll them up into their cones shapes as opposed to doing it myself. I had thought that professionals would do a better job than what I am capable of. Unfortunately, I was very much in error. They are neither round nor consistent. It will not effect the drive sprockets while in use, but it does case some cosmetic issues. Once everything is hard welded in you will be hard pressed to find the errors, but it does make getting the cone centered a real pain during the assembly process.

Here are some shots of the drive sprockets getting lined up in the jig I made for assembling them.

Jig is together and welding is about to begin.

The drive sprockets have been tack welded together. I will go through a do the final welds at a later time. Mostly I am letting the idea of dismantling them simmer. I am trying to convince myself that I do not need to tear them apart and cut out/roll up a new set of cones.

Now for the road wheels. After getting the issue with the rims hammered out or rolled to be more accurate, the road wheels went together very easy. As of right now, all have been tacked together and about 3/4's have been completely welded. I started welding the road wheels onto their hubs to start playing around with how best to assemble them.

You can see here the stack of road wheels.

Here are two different angles on a pair that have been welded onto their hub.

Moving forward, over the next few weeks I need to finish the road wheels and get the pairs welded on to their hubs. I also need to hurry up and finish the threads on the axles and spindles.