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How To Widen Steel Wheels At Home: No Hinky Strapping Needed. Watch This.


How To Widen Steel Wheels At Home: No Hinky Strapping Needed. Watch This.

I’m glad that Matt at Urchfab put this video together show his latest project’s little skinny wheels, being made into wheels that are much cooler. We’ve all seen wheels widened by cutting them down the middle and adding strapping to the center, which can be done “safely” if you really do it right, but that really isn’t the right way to make wheels wider. Not when you can buy new bare hoops to put your centers in anyway. And that is exactly what Matt is doing in this video. But he also shows you just how to do it so your back spacing is correct, your wheels are true, and so that they are welding well and safe for whatever you plan to do on them. I’ve been thinking about my own steel wheel project lately and unfortunately new bare hoops aren’t available in the wheel diameter  I want, so I might have to start with a complete set of wheels that I cut up just to use the rims. We shall see.

It seems funny to be talking about changing wheels at home, when companies like Wheel Vintiques have so many steel wheels available, but the truth is there are still wheel styles and factory wheel sets that they don’t make and neither do anyone else. So in those cases you either have to go with something else, or get creative.


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One thought on “How To Widen Steel Wheels At Home: No Hinky Strapping Needed. Watch This.

  1. Loren

    More info: Shown wheel centers are “Rostyles” made by Rubery Owen for various mfr’s in different versions plus aftermarket, the European equivalent of Magnum 500s. Welded wheels are easy to cut and press apart but riveted ones have the rivet holes punched through both thicknesses while assembled, those have to be drilled out oversize. Careless hammering -will- bend parts. The shown hoops will be difficult to mount tires on due to the dipped portion being well back from the rim (but I imagine it must have worked or they wouldn’t make ’em that way…) and they are of-course assembled reversed here. Centers should have a slight press fit, accurate diameter measurement of flimsy sheetmetal cylindrical shapes can be done with a Pi Tape. I’ve used a surface plate and machinist’s 1-2-3 blocks plus shims to set centers without having to make a special fixture. Truing-up is a time-consuming process but if you did your bicycle rims back when, car wheels are a cinch. With thrashed older rims just hit averages that repeat twice or more during a revolution, a large urethane hammer helps and it wouldn’t hurt to take the wheels to a balancer before tires are mounted to see how you did. With all that, “banding” and replacing centers takes about the same amount of time, I had to do both on my wife’s ’67 Mustang back when to re-chrome the GT centers and make the original rims wider, re-pops of any size became available about six months after all that, hah. The video-maker’s careful common-sense approach and nice welding are a great example and ensure anything he does will probably work out well.

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