pic: 6 inch wheel design

[A_Reed]

Originally Posted by 548swimmer

1.3 pounds seems a little heavy. I designed some simple 6inchers without any sprocket mounts that weighed in at around .65 pounds. Also, your exterior wall looks a little thick, how thick is it?

1.3 lbs may seem a bit heavy, but with no realistic numbers to run through the ANSYS FEA I have designed it to be overly robust with a 'standard' .25x.25 square cross section for each spoke. Anyone want to help me out on getting some realistic benchmarks for moment loading, side loads and radial loads.

As for the exterior wall, it is only 3/16" thick, the extra material on the sidewalls are only 1/8" thick and are there to add side support for the treads to take some wear off of the rivets.

Originally Posted by Edoc'sil

Any thoughts on how you would machine that? The angles look a bit tricky, almost like something you would have to mold out of plastic.

Originally Posted by Edoc'sil

It doesn't look like the spokes are flat, but it may just be distortion from the render.

The machining process on the major spokes would use a Ball-Nose end mill for all of the major cuts. The first cut(s) would be a 1/4" deep pocket that creates the fillets to the outer wall and to the hub, the front face of the spokes would be flat as the material is taken out between the two fillets. The second series of cuts would use the same mill stopping at the backside of the rear spokes creating the same fillets. As the wheel is flipped and the machining process is repeated the square edges of the spokes and the fillets would be defined on the backside of the front spokes.

The smaller triangles and hub weight savings could be done with any end mill that can plunge deep enough to clear out all material left behind by the fillets on the backside of the spokes.

Originally Posted by Jamie Kalb

Pretty neat.

For the "free" wheel, if the hub is wider than the rim, you can attach a flat sprocket directly to the (nicely integrated) bolt pattern on the wheel without an extra spacer. I can't tell from the picture if it's already like that.

No the hub is planar with the rest of the wheel on both sides currently. I will take that into consideration as a way to avoid adding extra spacers.

Thank you all for the comments and question. Keep 'em coming.