Hi everybody. You know all motorcycle and bicycle kits of 1/35 scale have spokes of the rims like those of toys with no satisfying detail. Has anybody ever scratchbuilt a rim? Do you have any suggestions about scratchbuilding spokes of them instead of the supplied funny ones? Any idea or experience is welcome...

I never have but presented with the question of how this is where I would start.
Go to the hardware store and get two round plumbing gaskets (rubber seals that fit between pipes). They would be the closest to tires.
I would fashion the rim out of slices of large diameter plastic tubing - PVC (plumbing stuff) or if plastruct gets that big go there.
For the hub I would go with a piece of sprue or doweling.
For the spokes I would go to the local hobby/craft store and get stiff small gage wire used in necklace making - maybe even straight pins and cut them to length. Maybe even fishing line would work - ie lacing up a drum or shoe.
The cross over pattern on the wheel is going to be the hardest part to mimic. If you look at a wheel notice how near the hub the spokes cross over each other. This is a design feature that builds in extra strength. You technically can go straight laced (straight from the hub to the rim with no cross over), however I do not believe that was done until the last 10 or so years and primarily for racing.

As for the bicycle wheels, Aber make this p/e set for the Tamiya kits



Maybe they or Eduard make detal sets for motorcycles?

Ok - spring for the extra $'s and go PE.....

There was an article in FSM years ago on how to make spoked wheels on car models. I will see if I can find it tonight and scan it. It was really involved, if I remember right.

Shaun

I used to make spoked wheels for peanut scale model airplanes. They were hard, because they had to be light too. I carved the rim/tire out of balsa, or styrofoam, and laced them onto a paper tube hub with silver thread.

I also made a set of spoked wheels for the front of a dragster years ago. I used the kit rim, and removed the existing plastic spokes. I then drilled out the rim, using the original spoke locations as a guide. then I made a hub out of a piece of plastic rod, drilled to fit on my axle. Then I drilled holes in the hub, where it would accept the spokes. I took .008 guitar string, and started cutting and installing spokes. The hardest part was getting th first four or five spokes installed and glued, to hold the whole mess together while I worked on it. I made a makeshift jig for this, by sinking a hole the size of the hub into a piece of scrap balsa, and shimming the wheel up with little bits of paper. after vI got things stabilized, it was just a matter of threading the bits of wire through the holes in the rim, and sticking the ends into the hub with tweezers. The results were pretty decent, although the wire was a bit too big. (It actually looked okay, but would have measured out to about 3/16" spokes! Luckily, the spokes used on dragster fronts at that time were really thick anyways, at about 1/8")

Both of these methods worked, although you would ned to find finer wire for the second method. It was much easier to thread the spokes with silver thread, than cut the individual pieces of wire. I had my rim split into a right and left half, so I actually wound the spokes onto one half, then glued the other half onto it, trapping the threads. I used very small pegs of balsa to hold the thread while I wound it. (Toothpicks would probably work here) I just wrapped the thread around the outside of the hubs. (Not prototypical, but it looked okay. Might not be good enough for a static model though.) One good place to look for metallic threads, and different thread like materials that can be painted, is a fly tying shop. I use a lot of fly tying stuff in my model building.

Look at some real spoked wheels to get the idea of the cross patterns, there are several variations. THe main thing to remember is, on most spoked wheels, all of the spokes enter the RIM at the centerline, and attach to the HUB at the outsides. THis gives the cross section of the wheel two triangular shapes, and gives the wheel it's lateral strength. Depending upon the size and detail level on the wheel, you might want to use flanges on the outside edges of the hub to attach the spokes too. (I sure wouldn't want to do that in 1/35 though.)

Good luck. I hope this helped.

I don't much like PE, but I saw a dio with Tamiya bikes with these Aber spokes, and they looked incredibly nice.

Great! Thanks for those ideas. Wish I could find a hobby shop here in Turkey which sells replacement parts for kits, but seems impossible. So the only way I can do it is scratchbuilding. I will improve the clues by Slodder and Daveman in a couple of days, hopefully and write here about the result again. Even at the time I read your suggestions, I had sparkles in my brain for a nice method. Thanks again.

You could make the spokes out of stretched sprue. The rim, maybe our of sheet plastic strips superglued. Not sure on the rim.

~Chip