Andrew Schauer

Since I only have one final exam left, and I wanted to waste the better part of an hour, I drew up these inaccurate approximations of the flatdish and CS wheel faces:




Ideally, you would create a model of the flatdish wheel in a 3D CAD/CAM program. Then you would be able to choose a toolpath for the CNC machine to cut out the material you want to remove, and end up with the CS style wheel.

If I had a flatdish wheel to take dimensions from, I would definitely offer to do so, but the only stock wheels I have are phonedials. Most CNC machine shops would be able to do the work no problem, and the price was mentioned previously.
If there is interest from someone in the Seattle area (Heinrich?) who has a spare flatdish, I could grab it while I'm there this weekend, and do the modeling once I'm back at school in January. There's a local machine shop here in Pullman who would have no problem machining the wheels.
Just my $0.02.

heinrich

Andrew pick it up this weekend

Andrew Schauer

Jeez, you must be watching this thread like a hawk....
I'm done at 5pm today, so if you're seriously interested in doing this, give me a call at (509) 333-3583 anytime after then. I will talk to the machine shop here and get an approximate price per wheel, or, once the modeling is done, anyone should be able to take the file to their local shop.

James-man

I wish there were cool students like Andrew locally at UNC Charlotte. Keep us posted, the file could come in handy.

thanks!

heinrich

I think we'lle get it done in short order.

Ron_H

When you're done and you want a competing method/price, call Susan at Devek. As I stated earlier, they have a shop here that does this routinely. No need to re-invent the wheel (pun intended).

Randy V

Sometimes it's fun to reinvent the wheel though, Ron.

heinrich

Dude, that will not be an option for me. I'll go ahead and "reinvent
this wheel"

James-man

If the shop is competitively priced and shipping and handling is included, I'll forego the file and send them. Just seems that, barring some ungodly sum for set up fees, avoiding S&H by having done locally would save a few $$$.

Heinrich must know of some OCC type shop locally. Are you holding out on us?

Peace

heinrich

Peace James ... there are many shops like that and Andrew said he'd look at a local shop for us. Prices in his area are generally much better than here. We'll get it donw, I have spares so we can experiment.

James-man

I'll bet there is some recently mothballed machining equipment at Boeing. It would probably be thinking way too far out of the box for them to rent their excess capacity to some underemployed machinists.

Sounds like y'all have a plan!

Andrew Schauer

I agree, ordering the wheels already machined from Devek would likely be the easiest, simplest, but perhaps not the cheapest way to go. However, I'm willing to give this a shot, and it sounds like Heinrich is as well. The fact that someone else has already accomplished the feat guarantees that it is possible. I will be sure to update this thread once we have some details worked out.

sublimate

CNC is way overkill - these don't need to be near that precise. The guy will probably just want to make a template out of flat metal to guide the wheel in the milling machine.

Ed Scherer

Well, I guess this is a good time to mention that if anyone wants to give this a go and needs some wheels, I've got the ones that came on my '90 S4 (7x16 front, 8x16 rear) in storage. Just the raw wheels (no tires), with the RDK sensors.

As I recall, they're in good shape (I don't remember any curbing marks or anything), but it's been about 4 years since I've looked at them. I'd let 'em go pretty cheap.

BTW, you can tell how much I like the slot wheels based on the fact that I didn't even want to use them for my winter wheels.

James-man

Any updates on converting flats to CS replicas?

Or should I be calling the new mother @ Devek?

Thanks,