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Thursday, December 31, 2015

Day 89 - 28 Chev Ute Restoration (31st December 2015)

Up at 5.30am this morning to drive up to Trafalgar, round trip 226 k's to see Grant Fowler and pull the 4 disc wheels off the spare rolling chassis to hopefully make up a complete set of 4 good wheels.

As you know the score yesterday was 3 good steel disc wheels out of a possible 9.

We had the wheels off in about 15 minutes and after a coffee, home by 10.45am.

Unloaded the wheels under the supervision of my workshop manager, stripped off the tyres and rims, then decision time.


I spun the 4 of them on the hub, all pretty good, and was able to knock a couple into a slightly better condition.

All 4 wheels had a heavy top coat, with a primer and etch primer underneath. The temptation was to just rub them back and hit it with a top coat.

As we all know people always make sure the base metal is sound before they repaint.

Having been caught before I know this is not the case, so I made the decision to strip them all back to bare metal.


On closer inspection one had heavy corrosion damage to the rim and with a bit of prodding broke through to the other side. Scratch 1 wheel, down 3 to go.



So we are down to three, still pretty good odds I thought


2 wheels appeared ok, the third was not so good. Severe pitting was filled up with numerous layers of paint, and a brazing repair had been done to fill a full thickness hole.

Directly on the other side of the wheel 180 degrees was a deep pitted area that when probed broke through to the other side.

Scratch wheel number 2, 2 to go.




The progressive score yesterday was 3 good wheels from 9, the final score is 5 good wheels from 13.

Down the track I will look a repairing a few as spares, but unless I was desperate would not use rusted through wheels, wheels with excessive run out, and wheels with extensive welding repairs.

A cracked rim should be scrapped without a second thought.

A few of the issues I encountered would have been a possible fix if Chev had not changed the manufacturing process for Disc wheels in 1928.

Up to 1927 steel disc wheels were made using rivets to attach the rim to the wheel center. These could easily be drilled out to separate the rim from the center.

For 1928, and probably to save money, rivets were only used in every 4th hole, with the next two holes replaced by piercing and punching the rim material into a domed rivet head looking pressing in the wheel center. At first glance it looks like a normal rivet head.

The following picture shows the rivet on the right and the pierced pressing on the left.


This picture shows rivets in the 1st and 4th location, with pierced pressing in the two locations in between.


On the inside of the wheel its easier to make out the rivet head in the middle, with the make believe rivet heads on each side.
 

The rivet head look alike pressing up close.


The difficulty in disassembling a 1928 steel disc wheel is you would have to drill a hole large enough to remove the full dome pressing in the wheel center.

That would mean a pretty large diameter dome head bolt to reassemble.

Still, that's for another day.

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