Hubless wheel design issues
With the CNC router unavailable, and unlikely to be able to cut through our metal anyway, we’ve had to look at alternatives.
Haydn, Jason and I went to Massey’s Industrial Design school and talked to their workshop technicians about using Massey’s waterjet cutter. Nick has a circular piece of lathe alloy to produce the internal ‘hubless hubs’ from.
It would be possible to cut the pieces from a piece of alloy sheet, but not possible to cut from a circular piece of alloy. It would be too risky to use on the water-jet cutter under so much pressure. Materials need to be strongly secured in place and there is nowhere to clamp to weigh down on our piece of alloy.
The Massey technicians suggested other options…
We could produce our shape in polystyrene, then make a sand cast of it, and get aluminium poured into it, melting the polystyrene. This would be cheap, but time consuming.
Rather than having the ‘conventional’ hubless internal wheel shape we could produce another shape that could still acheive our design intent. The conventional hubless wheel shape is a large hollow circle with a small ‘bump’ to fix the axle to.
We could also lathe out our ‘hubless hub’ on the lathe and add the ‘axle bump’ as a separate part later.
