Bogie Wheel Re-rubbering

[Andrew Rowe]

I have looked into doing moulds here in New Zealand. The cost was NZ$5750 for the mould for local pattern wheels with an insert in the mould for another NZ$1450 so that English / Canadian could be cast from the same mould.
Original English wheels seem to test out at 75 Shore hardness on average.
I was looking at using Black coloured polyurethane elastomer with mechanical properties as good, if not exceeding the original rubber. This project still sits in the melting pot! There is also on going research into the casting of tracks in China, but I do not see this happening any time soon.

[Dale Jordan]

Hi Andrew how would it go sending a couple of pallets of wheel by ship to OZ. The freight may not be that bad . The wheels are 32 Kg Each. Dale

[RichardT10829]

I have gone down the "china" route for tracks before, but you are still looking at 10K plus to get some made up.

There is a chap in Germany making ww2 track but the tooling costs alone were 15k. And you got a penalty for low numbers of links (ie anything less than 1000 links)

[Dave Schindel]

I used 2 part polyurethane to do 2 wheels and they are working out very well.After being run for several miles it's hard to tell the original rubber from the poly.the hard part was finding a supplier for the poly. I made a mould using fiberglass and a good wheel,then cleaned up a rim, installed the mould, and poured the poly.

[Andrew Rowe]

Yes Dale, I recon that is the best option for guys over here, if wheels need to get done , is to strip them here of old rubber and send them to Aus, or maybe cheaper to buy old rims in Aus, so there is only a one way trip.

[Hanno Spoelstra]

I recall Nigel Watson telling me about a company which remolded his carrier wheel(s): wrap a rubber strip around the wheel until it has the required diameter, cure the rubber and then machine it to shape on a CNC lathe. There is no need for a mould, so perfect for one offs or a small run. Has anyone looked into this?

H.

[Ben]

I had the 30's dated wheels re rubbered on the Scout using the method Hanno described, it's worked very well and looks great. The mould is a quicker and cheaper option after the initial outlay of the mould. The mould will be the key to a nice job but once it exists you can knock out as many as you like comparatively cheaply.

Out of interest the old chap warned me against using polyurethane as it has a tendency to "chunk" if the wheel ever caught something hard. I showed him a rubber original that has lost a chunk of sidewall and he said the same thing would happen but in his opinion the chunks would be worse for the same given incident. Both would ultimately do the same job.

Ben