BrooklynTrack

I have this obsession that I cant get out of my head, I keep thinking of how I can build a rear disk wheel with a 700 rim and a circular piece of wood.

Im going to try and ignore the 90% flame posts I'm gonna receive, but I cant get it out of my head and I wanna know if its at all possible.

Thanks guys and girls

G piny parnas

find out how they make plywood-- that would be my first intuition and did you see that guy who
built an all woodbicycle? its cool---

BCRider

I don't often say this but....










NO ! ! !

The plywood is far too flexible compared to spokes or opposed carbon conical dishes. And how would (wood?) you connect it to any sort of rim?

Just go lay down until the feeling goes away.

I thing it actually is possible to make a fully capable wooden track wheel. But it's not something you're going to do at home involving hardware store plywood. It would (wood?) require a careful study and fabrication using veneers and a form and a LOT more care and engineering than a spoked wheel or carbon wheel.

BrooklynTrack

[QUOTE=BCRider;7442123]I don't often say this but....










NO ! ! !

Ok, I was going to cut the wood into a circle, then screw down thru the holes in the rim (where the nipples would go) and use it that way, have an idea of what im thinking about?

G piny parnas

wait-- is carbon a solid material? wait--- is not plywood a viable candidate if you examine
the physics of multi layered materials-- sure-- bamboo, teek hardwoods but why the dump on quality plywood--- they all laughed at carbon when it first came out!

BCRider

That's much what I assumed. But the plywood is not going to be stiff enough side to side to support the wheel properly unless it is prohibitively thick. If you're looking at trying to make a disc wheel that is no heavier than a spoke wheel you'd need to use at most 1/4 inch plywood. And with that as an option the first time you stand up and try to sprint and the bike is loaded off to one side the whole thing will flex like a cheap garden hose. Or you can make it from something strong enough like 3/4 inch plywood it'll be strong enough but heavy as hell and you still have no good way to join it to the hub.

Sorry but like I suggested before it's best to just lay down until the feeling goes away. This is just not a good option to get a disc wheel. If you really must have one then learn to sew and make up some nylon aerodynamic covers to fit over the spokes on both sides. Or if you really MUST have a wood disc wheel then learn a bunch about wood technology, use raw hardwood veneer to produce laminated epoxy bonded cones with an integral wood outer rim (just like the old days ) and then figure out how to join them adequitely to some sort of custom hub and you'll have a great product.

You're going to have to go some to beat out the carbon options out there though.

EDIT: Sorry, all of the above is suggesting that you can't do this if your goal is to make a track or performance wheel and be anywhere near as good as a spoked wheel. But if the idea is just to make a wooden wheel to use on a wooden bicycle then yes you CAN do this. But it'll be something suitable more for beach cruising and not by any stretch for performance riding. If this more casual use is what you had in mind then it may work. But you still need a way to join it to a hub adequitely.

G piny parnas

oh fugeticalls, go ahead kid--- build yourself a wagon wheel and ride off into the sunset....
ooooo bourbon flavored doughnuts............................................

squirtdad

Lots of challenges with this:

first why? For the sheer why not? for the look of wood? any specific reason? the why could make a difference with the solution.

Do you care about weight at all?

How are you going to attach the hub?

How are you going to maintain the hub?


Bottom line .....I agree with the NO above...I don't think it is practical ..but if I was told I had to do, here are some ideas

Use pieces of plywood, each of a thicknes of half that of the rim, sized so that the are about 1 to 5 mm inside the braking area on the rim. make the inside of each piece match the shape of 1/2 of the rim. screw/glue the 2 pieces to gether, sandwiching the rim. hold the rim in place with glue. (a fancier variation would to build up a blanks of solid wood and then get a big lathe to make the pieces...could be very decorative.

for the hub...cut a centered hole the size of the hub in the plywood. turn a hardwood cylinder to match the size....with a hole in the center. cut your hub it the inside of the where the bearing go on both sides.....turn a matching space for the the hub parts on both sides of the the cylinder and glue the hub pieces in. Attach the cylinder to the disks....(it would be even better if the cylinder and disks had batching grooves to add mechanical connetion.

so it is doable...and probably simpler than this....but unless you have an artistic vision, I would not expect much of the wheel.

BrooklynTrack

Its not gonna be performance at all, just to see if i could make it work and not feel like I'm going to die riding it. I saw a wooden wheel the other month on FGG, it was a custom dutch front wheel art thing.

anyways,
I was going to use an track axel, find bearings that will fit snugly onto the axel and epoxy (or something) them straight onto the wooden disk, so the disk and the ball bearings are one, then I'd use spacers to make sure it didn't have a lot of play on the axel.

I dont know, but I'm pretty creative and pretty artsy and I really wanted to figure it out.

Do you think it would be simpler experimenting creating a front wheel?

Thanks to everyone

Shimagnolo

Don't listen to the naysayers! Go for it!
(But please do post the video of the first ride.)

Six jours

Two words: get video.

We all will want to see it, and there's money in it re. "Funniest Home Videos". Hopefully enough to cover medical expenses.

HTH!

BCRider

Epoxy is just a glue, it won't perform miracles. To do what you're considering you'll need a tube of metal or wood to support the bearings and space them out to where they would normally be for proper support. That would likely mean starting with a disc and then adding some hole saw core doublers and triplers to the center disc. Or somehow building a regular hub into the disc with more than just a thin center only glue line.

If you're looking to make parts in wood why not google for wooden bicycles? There's a lot of inspiration out there.

There MAY be another option. Google for "tortured plywood". It's kayak or small row boat method for forming plywood into shapes it would not normally hold and in doing so produces internal stresses that make the plywood self supporting. How does this apply to your project? If you can cut two discs from 1/8 mahogany door skin and cut out a center hole that fits over the outside of a hub and then drill and screw through the disk using the spoke holes to hold the screws (pick a self tapping size that works with the holes) and if you can make up a jig to force the hub down into a ring so that the lower disc is tortured into a cone shape. Then similarly force the upper disc down to meet it. Drill holes for small zip ties ever couple of inches and then ease off the pressure enough to slather a bead of epoxy into the last 1/4 inch where the two outer rims of the discs contact. Then force the upper back down into contact and zip tie the rim togeter all the way around and let cure overnight.

If done well you just formed two stressed cones of thin plywood and this will be FAR stiffer than any single disk short of something stupidly heavy made from 3/4 hardwood plywood.

Now as you can see this isn't a casual afternoon jigsaw and screwdriver sort of deal. It's a serious effort requireing jigs and some way to supply serious pressure from a jack in two directions to form symetrical cones. More than likely it would also need a 1/4 inch wide curved loop between the two discs to allow you to screw the rim on. Or if you have access to the right tools you can make the wheel rim out of wood but would more likely need to consider the glue on tubular tires for this.

Any how there's a few ideas for you to ponder.....

nitropowered

I've thought of lacing up a wheel and laying down balsa wood as a cover/fairing on the wheel. The balsa would not be structural so no worries there. I guess I could just use come plastic covering but the wood idea sounds cooler

BCRider

heeheehee.... wait until you see how much they charge for balsa these day.....

But yeah, that would look sweet. Or see if you can find a local outlet for wood veneer. Then you can have a whole rainbow of colors to choose from. It's really fussy stuff to work with though. In that regard the balsa would be better.

If it was me wanting to cover in a set of wheels I'd look at some of the model airplane plastic coverings. They've got some transparent ones that will both add color yet look airy as the spokes show through. The only issue is you'll need some sort of wire or plastic "wire" hoop to attach it to. And these coverings come in all sorts of metallics as well. Plus since the backing is a heat sensitive glue you can cut out patterns and iron them together to form some funky covers.

dabac

Building a competitive wooden wheel, no. building a rideable wooden wheel, sure. If it was me I'd do it like this:
- start with a 20 mm sheet of plywood, and a high flange hub
- cut some smaller discs, 2x the hub flange dia, the thickness of the discs + the wheel blank should be a press fit between the hub flanges. for a multi speed rear different thicknesses for left/right will be required
- drill these a tad larger than the hub spindle, then cut them in two
- cut a hole in the wheel blank just big enough for the hub flange to fit through
- put the hub in the hole, then slide the smaller discs in to hold it in place
- if everything seems to align, glue the disc halves in there, and screw the hub to the wood through the spoke holes
- get a router, make a temporary arm that goes between router and hub axle. use this to get the diameter round and right.
- notch wood for valve clearance fit rim, fit tire, ride
-If OK, start planning paint job on wheel

Torchy McFlux

Fred Flintsone thinks it's yabba-dabba-dangerous and that you should stick to wheels made of stone.

DannoXYZ 

I would do something like the Lightning carbon-fibre wheel-covers and similar to dabac's idea.

1. Get two solid 1" thick pieces of wood big enough to fit inside rim.

2. Spin them on lathe to get perfectly round circumference and lenticular outer surface (more aero and stronger than thin flat-piece)

3. Cut 1/2-rim groove on inside lip to match rim, don't make the groove so deep that when you press the two sides together that the wood would meet. You need a gap between the wood to squeeze them together and pinch the rim.

4. cut out centre to fit over hub-flange and drill to match spoke-holes in flange.

5. attach one disc-half to hub-flange and bolt on

6. attach rim to inside of disc

7. lay up 2nd disc-half on hub and bolt on

8. attached screws or bolts to squeeze halves together at rim. The two halves of the disc should form a V that will squeeze the rim outwards radially. This ensures that the rim doesn't deform and will transmit the load to the wood shell.

Have fun!

dabac

You'd need access to a fairly serious machine shop to find a lathe big enough to handle a bike wheel. It'd be spectacular though.
For the sake of accessibility I'd go with clamping a radius arm to the hub and to a router instead, then mill the wheel down in concentric rings working from the edge and inwards. The downside is that it'd create a stepped slope, but the good thing is that you could do it in your garage, with much more commonplace tools.

If we're assuming lathe access there's a rather nice trick one could try by cutting the hub apart so you get left flange and right flange. Then thread both ends of the spindle, either externally for a narrow spindle or internally for a thick spindle. One could then add a support sleeve with the matching thread that'd allow for the hub to be screwed back together with the wooden disc sitting proudly in the middle. flanges would once again be locked to the disc with screws through the spoke holes.

JTGraphics

I just want to see pictures of this after your done. In any case you'll end up with one nice heavy flywheel you may start off slowly but I'm sure that flywheel effect will keep it moving on flats at least wouldn't want to hit a hill with it on, I'll be watching

DannoXYZ 

You can use thinner wood to save weight. Perhaps 1/4" and lay down a sheet of carbon-fibre on the inside & outside surfaces. Since it's really the stressed skin that takes the load, you won't really need the wood on the inside anymore after that. So you can use some foam to start and lay the carbon-fibre on that... WAIT, we're now building a carbon-fibre disc wheel.. OK, back to wood...

Question would be, what kind of finish are you going to have? I kinda like mahogany with a polyurethane varnish myself.

lymbzero

I say forget all the haters.. Try building a wheel out of wood.

But really, it's going to be heavier than any existing wheel but
think of all the medieval wagon wheels they used to make out of timber.
It has been done, you just got to want it!

If you can get it perfectly round and router out the clincher part for a tube and tire..
I think that would be very cool.
I think the routing will be the hardest next to the hubshell.

Good luck!

Six jours

This was a bit popular with Rory O'Reilly's crowd at the old Encino velodrome in the late '80s. They were using 24" inch wheels with aero rims and high flange hubs. This allowed plenty of surface area to which we glued the heat shrink airplane covering with contact cement. Then the heat gun tightened up the plastic and took out the wrinkles. This worked about as well as the disk wheels of the day, and was a good bit lighter.

Made for a pretty cool sound especially when sprinting out-of-the-saddle, and when you got a pedal in the spokes the stuff practically detonated and flew everywhere.

TimJ

How about a wooden disk with a hole in the middle for the axle, and then two thick, round bits on either side with holes through them as well, and countersink some sealed bearings into them?

Like: (, oh, this didn't work when I posted it. Imagine the 2 - and 4 | are the "hub in the middle of the disk)

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That could work for a front. On the rear... bolt a track cog on.

I assume you're just thinking of doing this for fun so screw all the ninny's, make one.

tellyho

Just to make sure you reach your 90%: you're on crack.

Here are some things you can occupy your mind with that are more important and useful:

world hunger
AIDS
nostril hair
Brittney Spears
Brittney Spears' nostril hair
Whether it's possible to contract AIDS from exposure to nostril hair
Which presidential candidate has the best solution for Brittney Spears' nostril hair

Hope this helps. If not, there's always drugs.

Jeff Wills

Yeah, well... the OP should wander over to the Dark Side, in Recumbentland. The World's Fastest BicycleŽ has home-made carbon-fiber disk wheels:
https://www.ohpv.org/albums/bm2004/va...s/varnas17.htm
https://www.ohpv.org/albums/bm2004/va...s/varnas18.htm

These were made with surplus Boeing floor panel material, an aluminum rim, and a bunch of epoxy.

Verified good for 80+ mph speeds:
https://www.vimeo.com/1595041
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7tc5ijzFxY
and 80+ mph crashes:
https://www.ohpv.org/albums/bm2003/at.../photo_10.html