Split rims... Why?
Discussion
Seems I wasn't guessing....
some website said:
Composite vs. One-Piece Wheels
Three-piece, or composite, wheels came into vogue in the 1970s, and reached their peak of stylishness for street use in the 1980s. In the beginning, they provided several benefits. At the time, forging a one-piece wheel was not economical. Porsche's factory forged Fuchs alloys, especially in the wider sizes, were and are today considered very special, expensive items. One-piece centers could be forged, however, and bolted to spun aluminum rims, giving a strong, lightweight wheel. Additional benefits included flexibility of fitment and repairability. Rims could be built for nearly any width or offset, so if you needed just 40 or 50, or maybe only eight, for your racing program, tooling up was a piece of cake, and the costs to be amortized quite reasonable. A damaged rim could be replaced separately, making it cheaper to keep going in the rough world of racing. A three-piece wheel's advantages of exact fitment and repairability remain today, as ever, and are significant. Most high-end composite wheel manufacturers deal in low enough volumes that custom sizes and offsets are a regular part of their business. Unfortunately, manufacturing a composite wheel is extremely labor intensive. A human must assemble the piecesÑhumans are slow, and cost a lot more than machines. A one-piece forged wheel is comparatively more expensive to tool up for. The process is faster, though, so these extra costs can be spread out over a larger number of wheels. In a one-piece forging, all the material is structural. There are no bolts, no flanges to be bolted together, and no extra material for the bolts to bite into, so a one-piece wheel may be a pound or two lighter than an equivalent three-piece wheel.
kneegrow said:
Bought them because 7x10" rims are virtually impossible to find.
Yeah - can't see there being too much general demand for 7x10 these days (although I used to have a set of 6.5x10 single-piece Minilites once upon a time!).
kneegrow said:
They are also easy to assemble the tyres onto. I do a lot of that myself and split rims take away the mayhem.
Interesting... In what way is it easier to get the tyres on?
Pigeon said:Not in my experience - they are normally sealed with silicon goo, which makes it very difficult to actually split the rims!
kneegrow said:
They are also easy to assemble the tyres onto. I do a lot of that myself and split rims take away the mayhem.
Interesting... In what way is it easier to get the tyres on?
Because you can unbolt the rims and reassemble them with the tyre in place?
Careful application of an old screw driver and a hammer seems to do the trick though!
for wide tens speak to Carl Austin of Force racing (www.force-racing.co.uk). Yes, this is the same nutter with the red twin engined ear splittingly loud drag Mini.
There is another big advantage with split rims - you can get the centre forged from magnesium alloy much more cheaply than for the whole wheel (I mean seriously cheaper) so that the entire wheel is still a fraction of the cost of a single piece mag-alloy wheel but still very light (roughly half the weight of an equivalent vanilla-alloy wheel).
For racing the split rims mean lighter still wheels as they can take shortcuts on the design as they don't (generally) need to handle the same sort of shock loadings. The real pros will be using a bespoke single piece design but anyone at the cheap end of the market (ie me) can get much the same benefits.
For racing the split rims mean lighter still wheels as they can take shortcuts on the design as they don't (generally) need to handle the same sort of shock loadings. The real pros will be using a bespoke single piece design but anyone at the cheap end of the market (ie me) can get much the same benefits.
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