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I wanted a wood rim for my '77 like the one I have in another car I restored but unlike that one no one offers pre-cut top and bottom halves that can be bonded to the frame and then finished. So I bought some mahogany boards from Home Depot, a $55 router from Harbor Freight, fabbed up a circle routing jig from 3/4" plywood and made my own. The finish is Minwax English Chestnut stain and 12 coats of Man O War glossy spar varnish, I emptied a whole spray can. Overall though it took a fair amount of effort, more than I thought but then again what doesn't?
Those shadows are probably from the quilt, but I did put in finger reliefs. Did that by wrapping a 1 1/4" hole saw with sticky back 180 grit sandpaper, putting it in my drill motor and laying it radially across the back of the rim. I think there are about 30 of them. One other thing I should mention, the rim is about 1 inch thick and as I mentioned before there are two halves bonded over the metal rim. You cannot buy 1/2 inch thick boards, has something to do with how the logs are sawed, or sawn as in 1/4 sawn, I don't understand it completely. I had to find someone who would plane the 3/4" Home Depot boards down to 1/2", luckily the shop who built our kitchen cabinets 20 years ago were willing to do it.
The thing I like about this the best is that I still have my original spoked hub.
Did I mention that I really don't enjoy woodworking? Hate the dust...
Since I'm too far away from you to get the template you made maybe some pics and dimensions if don't mind.
Looks even better installed.
Rodnok1 this should help get your thought process started, it has been about a year since I did this so my memory is a bit fuzzy. When I started the job I made a diameter measurement of the steel rim and then calculated all the radiuses that I needed. Those all went out the window because I quickly found out that the rim was not perfectly round so the internal groove, where the rim would sit, had to be wide enough to accommodate the eccentricity. On top of that you need to take into account both the top and bottom pieces so it gets a little tricky.
The jig base is ¾” plywood, the arm is two pieces of 1/4” paneling screwed together, one piece has a hole cutout big enough to allow the router to sit in.
I put a bronze bushing in the middle of the base, not sure if that was needed but I thought it would help with precision.
A T-nut on the back of the arm locks in the radius adjustment:
Close up of the layout and routs. The inner rout is for the ID, the pencil arcs are the steel rim and the outer rout is the OD.
That little hole is important, there are four of them equally spaced. The trickiest part of this whole thing was that once I separated the wheel halves from the rest of the workpiece by routing the ID, the halves were now loose and I still needed to rout the chamfers. What I did was leave four "bridges" in the rim groove so that I could pass four wood screws through the base into the wheel halves so that I could hold them down to rout the chamfers. Hopefully that makes sense, it did work though. I then used a Dremel to get rid of the bridges which then allowed the steel rim to sit in the groove.
As I mention above, the Home Depot boards were 3/4 inch thick and about 8" wide. So I had to have them planed down to 1/2" and then glued two of them together to get enough width for the 14" wheel. I was able to talk a local custom cabinet shop into doing the planing. The wheel is about an inch deep and a little less than an inch wide.
Again I hope this all makes sense, let me know if you have any questions. I'm not really much of a woodworker, if you are maybe you can improve the process.
I got one from ecklers that looks much the same. You did a nice job
The aftermarket wheels are nice and definitely tempting but I wanted to keep my original spoked hub along with the original horn push. My car is an early '77 and if I am not mistaken those horm pushes were recalled because they were too shiny or something like that.
As for you C2 guys I can't speak to any of those spoke mods, all I can say is good luck with that...
11-18-2018, 01:28 PM
DIY steering wheel rim for a '77
