The traction engine front wheels are 70mm in diameter and 12mm wide. The wheel rims have been machined from 70mm mild steel round bar that is 1 inch long. This really didn’t leave any margins for error in diameter or width.
I bored the mild steel and then parted them with the thinnest possible parting tool. Sadly I didn’t take an image of this. This then gave me two rims that were 70mm outer diameter, 57mm inner and 12mm wide.
This is a terrible image, but once I roughed the rims out I just had to offer them up to the rear wheels.
The rims look quite large in diameter, maybe this is down to the angle of the photograph.
I roughed the rims out using the Warco 240B lathe and the new Soba chuck.
Machining the front wheels was one of the reasons for upgrading the 3-jaw chuck on the lathe to a Soba chuck. I was tired of having to use the 4 jaw and aligning the parts every time using a dial gauge.
I had to check by overlaying the wheels on the A4 image of the traction engine. How cool is it going to look? I now have to keep looking at the parts and what they are to become.
The final machining of the Traction Engine Front Wheels was done then as a repetitive swapping of the parts in the chuck and repeating each machining operation.
This machining was done on the Hobbymat.
This way I get both exactly the same.