Welcome to RAW Works. My name is Raymond and I live in the western suburbs of Sydney. This blog will be a portal for me to photo-document the wheels I refurbish and repaint. This is only a side hobby for me so there won't be any crazy custom jobs! My skills have only stretched so far as to using body repair materials, resprays and polishing, so anything that requires welding and unbuckling will be beyond what I can do. I hope to improve on my current skills as I go along, and as a lover of wheels, it's a way for me to express my art side as well as giving life to some tired wheels again.

At the moment, I'm just scouring through eBay for damaged wheels selling for cheap. If you have any wheels you don't need anymore, throw me an email/comment. At the moment I'm just buying sets of wheels to refurb then sell them off. I prefer not to do personal jobs/requests as I don't trust myself with that yet! But that said, pass me an email/comment if you need any help wheel-wise.

My Facebook page is @ http://www.facebook.com/raysalloywheelworks/, please "like" it!

Cheers.

Sep 27, 2010

Art project III - What to use as wheel display stands?

I've been thinking about this for a long time. What can I use to hold up the wheels? I did some quick searching and remembered that there have been examples of 3-piece wheels being used as trophies for some car shows. This is a fantastic example:





It's simple, robust, and just looks perfect for a 3-piece wheel. Only problem is that it could be expensive to make as I'm not handy with a welder, nor do I have contacts to get sheet metal readily.

Another cool example that I found used existing car parts:




I don't have spare hubs but I do have rotors lying around, but again, the same issue applies here that was in the first one - welding is required and I'll need 3 of each part to make the stand, which I don't have at home.

I've posted up my dilemma online on some discussion boards I frequent (VWWatercooled Australia, and Wheel-Whores.com). I got some helpful feedback from the former - using wood! I gathered the ideas that were discussed and came up with what you see below (bottom of the picture):



Not very space efficient but it will do the job and will do it cheaply as I can just buy some pieces of MDF from Bunnings and saw + nail away as I've got the tools at home already. Basically it'll look like a mini lectern with a long base. The wheel will be mounted up on the wood plate on the top, angled at around 70 degrees. The wheel will be bolted on through the plate (I will drill some holes). The stand will roughly be 30 cm high, and the base will be long enough to support the weight of the wheel without falling over. Basically there will be three main pieces, and each of them will be nailed in together. I'm still deciding on what the finish of the stand will be. Easy thing to do is to paint each of them black. More time-consuming would be to finish them in a way that is indicative to the wheel they're displaying:

Splintered/aged wood for the rusted stage:


Raw but sanded wood for the prep stage:


Varnished wood (pine? beech? Any wood that has that ring appearance) for the completed stage:


I like where this is heading so far!

1 comment:

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