Home made lightweight wheel covers
In trying to find some lightweight wheel covers for our kitfox to keep the grass and grunt out of the wheel bearing area I couldn't find any that had the correct amount of "dish" to them, so I made some.....using a technique called "Metal Spinning".
First photo is of the wood plug fabricated on the Lathe out of 3" white spruce (that's all I had laying around for something that thick)
Photo #2 is of the 0.017" thick aluminum sheet screwed to the wood plug (had some 0.017" laying around)
Photo #3 is of the spinning process using a 3/4" hardwood dowel for a spoon (yup - the dowel was just laying around too)
Photo #4 is the two completed blanks before trimming/deburring
Last two are the trimmed/deburred wheel covers.
Each wheel cover ended up weighing in at 1.45 ounces.
Still have to paint to match and drill the three little mounting holes; but, this whole business up to this point took barely an hour....FYI - I have never done any metal spinning before but it works pretty slick - that is how aluminum prop spinners are made also but I am sure those guys have far more sophisticated equipment.
Sincerely,
Dave S
KF 7 Trigear
912ULS Warp Drive
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