Making road wheels tyre treads - The lazy way! :D

[Alvaro Rodriguez]

Gents:

 

There you go a SBS I posted in FB some years ago on the topic of making tyre treads for road wheels. 

 

 

1.- Here we go with some basic in detail wheels

 

 

2.- We can see that basic tyre tread detail is raised while it should be engraved.

The challenge here is to have five grooves as tyre tread and a must have is to have them parallel and evenly spaced too.

 

 

3.- There you go the required tools for this task. A sharp and thin p.e. saw seems obvious. But, trust me, the critical key tool is the post-it block. 

 

 

4.- You may not notice it yet, but this is the basic principle. Combining the saw and the post-it block will give us a cut parallel to the workbench flat surface.

 

 

5.- Just stacking more or less post-it notes we can determine the exact height for any of those tyre tread channels. It´s easy and rather precise! 

 

 

6.- Notice you that placing the saw forward / backwards into the post-it block...

 

 

7.- ...we can control how much depth our channel is going to be with some good precission.

 

 

8.- Once we have decided the saw potition and height for the first groove we are good to go.

 

 

9.- So simple!

 

 

10.- As soon as we are done with the first groove, just add as much post-it notes you may need to raise the saw to the next cutting position.

 

 

11.- Here we go again... let´s place the p.e. saw...

 

 

12.- And we are ready to go

 

 

13.- Rinse and repeat!

 

 

14.- And the final product.

 

 

Regards!

Alvaro

[badger]

Fantastic tip Alvaro!!

 

Thanks for sharing. I'll try this out on some Ace British staff car wheels as I have a few of their kits to build.

[Black Knight]

Thanks for this.

I have some tyres which need treads. This method should work

[modelmaker]

Why didn't I think of this? Excellent idea, well done!