On a whim, I ordered a used copy of "The Wheelwright's Shop"
by George Sturt, who gave up schoolteaching and took over
his father's wooden wheelwright shop in 1884 and published
his reminiscences in 1923.
Interestingly, Sturt resembled certain bicycle wheelwrights
on RBT in that he was also given to publishing political
tracts (socialist, if it matters).
In light of our modern metal wheels, much of the book is
curious, dwelling as it does on various kinds of wood, how
the trees are bought, hauled to the shop, seasoned, split,
sawed, and then seasoned even more. Just as we debate the
use of steel, aluminum, titanium, and other materials, so
does Sturt worry about the properties of oak for the spokes
versus elm for the hubs (which wheelwrights called the
"stocks"😉.
The book is also odd in that much of it is about the
struggles of a son taking over his late father's eight-man
shop and trying to run a surprisingly complicated business
without even knowing how much to charge. Local bike shop
owners may feel a certain pang at the opening sentence of
Chapter 10: "I should soon have been bankrupt in business in
1884 . . ."
Anyone hoping to find a simple how-to book that makes
building wooden wheels easy will be disappointed. It takes
so many specialists with so much hard-won judgement to put
together a good dung-cart wheel that Chapter 18 begins,
"After the last chapter, it will be seen why I never learnt
to make a wheel."
The vagaries of wood, the lack of power machinery, and the
odd details involved in heating and shrinking iron tires
onto the wheel remind us how wonderfully easy it is to
"build" a modern bicycle wheel.
The wheels in the book are mostly wooden cart wheels with
twelve spokes, all heavily dished to only one side (imagine
sliding the narrow end of a funnel onto the end of the cart
axle). Among other things, Sturt explains why this odd
dishing is needed on horse-drawn carts, why the outer edges
of a cart's wheel-tracks in his corner of England could vary
no more than an inch in width (5 ft 10 & 1/2 inches to 5 ft
11 & 1/2 inches), and why wheelwrights held carpenters in
contempt.
Apart from working with wooden hubs, spokes, and rim
sections, Sturt's gang of wheelwrights had to deal the
problems of a handling a five-fooot wheel that weighed about
150 pounds, 90 pounds of which was the 16 foot long, 2 & 1/2
inch wide, 3/4 inch thick iron tire. (Sturt includes some
ingenious speculation about the origin of "tire" as a word.)
Shrinking the red-hot metal tire onto the wooden wheel
produced a noise that might worry any bicycle wheel builder
who's heard the ominous clicking of carelessly twisted
spokes unseating:
"But what was that click it gave as often as not, when it
was bumped on to the ground? A series of clicks, of which
this was the last, a succession of sounds like the snap of a
toy pistol, had been coming from the wheel as the water was
poured on it from the first. I liked to hear these noises.
They were the sound of spokes going home into their
mortices, dowels into their dowel-holes. They told that the
tyre was doing its work. More than ablest workman could do
with sledge and wedges, this shrinking hoop of iron was
pulling the wheel together all round and would not be
gainsaid. If there was no further 'give' in tenon or dowel,
then the terrible tyre would bend the oak spokes themselves,
and the dozen three-inch spokes that had been so straight
were now bowed forward as if with an incipient spinal
curvature."
Ye gods! A 150-pound wheel is about to taco after eight men
took a day or two to build it--and there's no way to release
the tension in time. Just cutting the constricting iron band
to the right length took two men, a sledge hammer, a cold
chisel, an anvil, and repeated blows to both sides of the
band.
Think you're rough and ready, making do with whatever's at
hand, fashioning tools from bizarre material?
"Moreover, the face (front) of the felloes [wooden rim
sections] was everywhere blackened with smoke, which (for
the painter's sake) was now scraped off. Broken glass was
used for this. It did not cut too deep into the felloes."
Concerned that your rounded bicycle tire is worn flat? Sturt
explains why wider mud wheels had to be "bevelled"--instead
of lying flat on the ground, their inside edges sloped
toward the axle, as if they were a cross-section of the very
widest part of a funnel pointing inward.
Used to broad nipples holding spokes in rims and flat-head
wire nails? Sturt describes the advantages of using
old-fashioned square-cut, tapered nails in wooden wheels.
Oddest of all is the ancestor of our tubular versus clincher
camps. I'd always thought that there was only one way to
make a wooden wheel, namely the shrunk-on iron band. This
turns out to be the equivalent of our modern clincher tire.
Sturt mentions an older method, involving "shoeing" wooden
wheels with iron sections known as strakes to link the
felloes together.
Just as older bicyclists lament the loss of curious details,
so does Sturt complain about strange little signs of
progress, such as metal buckets replacing wooden pails and
paint no longer coming in conveniently re-usable containers:
"I think I bought no new paint-pots [after 1888] from the
local pottery. The old ones having been 'burnt out' often
enough (you started fire in a paint-pot with a wisp of
shavings from the wood shop, after which the old dry paint
burnt by itself--and smelt to Heaven--leaving the glazed
earthenware tolerably clean) the old paint-pots not renewed,
were replaced by paint tins, improvised from 'empties' that
had come from the manufacturer full of some special red or
green. You couldn't burn out these tins so well--they fell
to pieces if the solder melted--but why trouble? More and
more came in their place . . ."
Bike shop owners can sympathize with this comment:
"Often the yard was crowded with carts and waggons brought
in for some slight attention; though, to be sure, in bad
winter weather whole days would go by when nothing--not so
much as a wheelbarrow--came, and I began to wonder what to
set the men at. . . . But, by and by, when spring borught a
change of weather and the shop was busy and the yard full,
when the farmer wanted his wheel, or his waggon, or his
decrepit shafts urgently by next day, then would come
peremptory messages, unreasonable demands, to get the job
done forthwith or it would be taken away to some other shop.
Yet not seldom it happened that, after a job had actually
been taken out of its proper turn and the owner notified, it
woulb be left in the yard in the way for a week or two."
The road dust that wears out our chains also wore out an odd
piece of cart equipment called a roller-scotch. Used to stop
the cart automatically from rolling back downhill when the
horse paused to rest, it was just a wide wooden roller bound
with iron hoops, a bit like a kitchen rolling-pin dangling
behind from chains on either side of a wheel:
"The elm core was itself cased in three iron bonds. And you
saw why when it came to repairs. You felt ass if you were on
a dusty road then. For road-dust lay in the wheel track
which the roller so closely followed; hot summer road-dust
rose in clouds from the horse-hoofs and smother the roller.
No doubt there was sometimes mud, yet that was not what you
thought of when you saw the roller, or at any rate what I
remember now. It must have been dust--the dry soft powder of
hot weather--that had polished the bonds bright and tin, and
worn away the elm between them and made the spindle shine."
Any RBT poster will passages in Sturt's book that seem
charmingly close to familiar topics. I can easily imagine
hot debate about whether mud or dry road dust is what
actually wears out scotch rollers, whether goose grease or
candle-wax is a better lubricant, and why what was known as
a dog-stick is superior to a scotch-roller.
A nice glossary helps. Inter-library loan may obtain a copy
in a few months. Used and new copies can be found on
www.bookfinder.com. A publisher in India offers an
inexpensive reprint, but shipping from India is high for
most of RBT.
Cheers,
Carl Fogel