Armoured Vehicle Road Wheels

[Douglas Greville]

Robin

Your decision.

I will say, that the failure mode of synthetics is from the inside out. Likewise bad formulation rubber. So it is not a case of watching to see if rubber is failing. Case of "oh crap, we just shed a pad or tyre, but they all looked perfectly ok 1/2 hour ago".

Alternately, you could fabricate "wear disks" which is what the M113s use on the inner face of their road wheels. Makes a huge difference.

Regards
Doug

Originally Posted by Robin Craig

I appreciate the advice and I enjoyed reading the learned document and grasped what it was all about.

As a civilian we are having issues obtaining NOS road wheels. The original rubber could have been as old as 1985 and is well past it's best before date.

We have to re-cover the road wheels and not using rubber seems for our amount of use and or abuse to be a value option.

The Bv206 track is designed to flex and twist and has more than one contact point. Once the moulded edge of the road wheel breaks down and the steel guide horns of the track make contact with the aluminum wears very fast.

I have a few pictures to put up in a minute.

We were royally shafted by a major company in Winnerpeg who did the rubber re-life a few years ago and despite having an NOS example as a pattern part to follow decided for ease of manufacture to machine the edge off and leave no side protection. We were forced to pay up front and despite all kinds of efforts it was felt un-economic ( by higher) to lawyer up and get into a legal fight. We have smarted ever since.

This time I am treading very carefully