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MG MGA - Steel wheel straightening

Hi

Is there anyone in the UK or Europe that can straighten my steel wheels? They are out of true but I don't want to change to a wire or non standard rim. They are 1600 rims. I have read Barney's site but don't have a hydraulic ram to push them, plus I lack the confidence to do agood job

Thanks

Barry
B Bridgens

Barry, there must be a lot of good s/h wheels around.
Art Pearse

Hi Art

I now have 11 wheels 9 of which are outside the 1/8 inch limit. I really don't want to buy any more. Despite sellers saying the wheels are good,when they arrive they are out of spec. It is difficult finding wheels on your doorstep to test before buying.

Barry
B Bridgens

There are many specialists straightening aluminum wheels, they should be able to do steel.
Any machinist worth his salt with a big lathe should not have a problem; it is exactly the same as making parts by metal spinning.

FRM
FR Millmore

I did find a place a few years ago in South Wales that said that would do it.

Most wheel repairers only work on wire wheels or polishing Alloys.

I never followed it up so I can't give any report on quality.
Dan Smithers

I have had my TF steel wheels straitened by a shop in Massachusetts but they were not able to work on the MGA 1600's wheels. He didn't say why, just that he couldn't do it.
David Werblow

Here in Holland I know the (leading specialist) alloys straightener won't do steel wheels. I don't know exactly why.

How do you measure the wheels? 9 out of 11 sounds like a bit too much bad luck?
Willem vd Veer

Hi Willem

The problem is trying to balance the wheels, lots of lead with some being impossible to balance. I put the wheels on the front of the jacked up car with a dial guage on the outside of the rim. They are all out of the 1/8 inch run out. Some worse than others. A quick spin of the wheel and you can see the tyre wobbling. The originals were bad so I bought a set off Ebay which I was assured were good but all out of spec. There is another set of 5 on Ebay Uk just now but I guess they might be just the same. These rims have seen 50 years of use. That is why I would prefer to get mine trued up.

Barry

Barry
B Bridgens

I have just about concluded that there never was any such thing as straight steel wheels for the MGA. I suspect then were all slightly out of plane from original assembly, some worse than others. In the early 90's I was breaking steel wheels regularly (stress cracks) while autocrossing nearly every weekend. I broke at least a dozen wheels and threw out several more that were too far out of whack to use. I finally sold the last half dozen wheels more recently, so I have gone through at least two dozen wheels. Of those at least two thirds of then were at least 1/8 inch out of plane. I thin Barry is right, and it is almost futile trying to buy more wheels with wishful thinking they they may have less than 1/8 inch run out.

1/8 inch out of plane is no problem at all, as long as the wheel is round and concentric. Up to 1/4 inch out of plane is serviceable, except it looks weird to a casual observer when it wobbles while driving on it.

There will be a problem with computerized spin balancers that may specify more than one pound of lead weights per wheel when they are 1/4 inch out of plane. They tend to put two four-ounce weights together on one side and another half a pound on the other side half way around, trying to eliminate a very small lateral vibration that results from being out of plane. Most people would never notice such a minor aberration while driving an MGA, so all the extra weights used for dynamic balancing ay be a waste of effort.

I balance mine on a static balancer (bubble balancer) with just two small weights on the outside where they can be seen. I run a black marker around the weights so if they get knocked off it is obvious where they belong, and can be easily replaced. Static balancing was SOP in the 50's and into the early 70's, before spin balancing machines took away the requirement for a technician who can think for ten seconds at a time.

I still have a steel spare wheel that is 1/4 inch out of plane with one pound of weights from prior spin balancing. When I need to use it occasionally (once every 10 years or so) it seems to run smooth enough, but does bother some people to see it wobble. Please don't ask how old is the tire.

Radial run out is much more important than lateral run out. For the spin test you need to put the indicator on the cylindrical surface of the outer rim. If it runs concentric within 1/16 inch it should be okay. If the radial run out is greater than 1/16 inch it is either junk or needs straightening along the rim. Local divots in the rim are a result of hitting road hazards.

I sometimes straighten the local rim dents using a 2-inch wide cross peen hammer for a punch, and hitting it with a heavier hammer. If radial run out is greater than 1/16 inch it may be impossible to balance, and even if well balanced it may still bounce at road speed. In that case you would have to shave/grind the tire tread to be concentric before balancing, which is an expensive process wasting a lot of useful tread rubber.
Barney Gaylord

I do not recall these wheels being out of spec either way in the 60s when I was doing many of them, and using an on-car spin balancer. Any time I checked one, they were within spec except for local damage - usually why I was checking. We rarely wound up with more than 1/2 Oz weight anywhere; if more than an ounce seemed necessary I looked for the real problem. We did have trouble with American made tires, but not UK or European ones. Michelin, Pirelli, and Dunlop were the only makers of radials then.

I would expect anything near, and certainly over 1/8 out-of-plane to be very disturbing, though possibly hard to nail down. Radials especially want to run straight, and this would amount to having toe vary randomly by up-to the sum of the front wheel runout. My extremely good front end man used to set total toe-in at 1/32" for radials.

While other areas may do for rough checks, the ONLY correct place to measure runout either direction is on the bead seats with tire removed, and the ONLY correct mounting is stud mounted on the hub or an equivalent. Just like wires or Rostyles, generic cone adaptors on computerized gee-whiz machines is a waste of time and extremely misleading.

I commonly find that simply removing the pound of weights installed by the "pros" fixes all sorts of problems, and adds to my weight collection! I now balance on old hubs with free bearings held in my vise. And with good wheels and good tires, frequently use no weights.

On one of my Mazdas I have beautiful Italian, BBS copy wheels, one of which was bent from hitting a giant pothole or something. I bandsawed two blocks to the radius of the bead seat, from oak, and bolted them together to support the wheel. Made a big punch from an oak 2x4 with the end radiused to the outside of the rim. Beat the bejeezus out of it with a 8 lb hammer - these wheels are TOUGH. Wound up with the wheel within .005" both ways, the other 3 unbent ones were within .010". Mounted General Altimax HP and needed NO weights at all. Road test for 10,000 miles, (now 30,000) sometimes well into three digits shows no vibration or noise of any kind.

So, should I build a machine to true these wheels? Won't help Barry much, but US guys might like it.
I recently attempted to get a guy who had bought a very expensive machine for wheel work to do T series wheels, as there seems to be a crying market - he did not even answer my e-mail or posted Forum messages!
What kind of prices would make everybody (including ME) happy? Any serious input on this to my e-mail above, subject "Wheel Straighten".

FRM
FR Millmore

Tyres are often out too. I have been respoking wire wheels, an "expert" told me how close to get them but (being an old bloke) I have forgotten. One eighth seems OK but a quarter seems too much. Surely somebody knows!
Barry Bahnisch

Anybody ever try to get their MGA tires mounted using a "road force" system? I had one set of non-MGA tires done this way and it seemed to work out well. The machine measures runout of the wheel both radial and lateral, then they mount a tire on it. Then they measure the tire under load and compare it(by computer) to the original numbers. They then demount and rotate the tire for "best" runout. only when the tire/wheel assembly is at the minimum runout do they balance. It sounded to me like the best way to mount tires. It is done with a Hunter GSP9700 balancing machine. It certainly won't fix bent rims but it does measure and will tell you if the rims are too far out of round. It could help in getting the best round assembly. From what I saw, it won't work with wire wheels.

I also restrung wire wheels some years back. I seem to remember that <1/16" was desireable and 1/8" was the limit both radial and lateral.
Chuck Schaefer

I can't recommend a place in Europe, but for those of you here in the states, go to stocktonwheel.com.
I sent them 4 of my steel wheels from a '60 MGA and they straightened all of them out. Did a good job; no more vibration at speed. Had them bead-blast the wheels and painted them myself. Only downside is that the turnover isn't all that fast; took about 4-6 weeks if I remember correctly.
L.R. deOlazarra

Hi

I have no luck in finding anybody to straighten my wheels. I have just bought 4 more off Ebay, fingers crossed these are OK.

Barry
B Bridgens

This thread was discussed between 29/08/2012 and 16/09/2012

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