How to Rubberise Your Traction Engine Wheels And Test To Destruction!

Rubber Sheet on Steel Wheel

How to Fit Rubber Sheet Tyres to your Miniature Traction Engine and Test the Durability with a Simulated Dynamic Road Test. (Video Below)

Many builders of miniature traction engines of a scale suitable for the driver to sit on when running (4″ + Scale) don’t fit rubber tyres at first, including myself when I built my 6″ (half full size) miniature Little Samson Traction Engine.

But they soon learn that running steel straked wheels on asphalt roads is a real boneshaker and they look for ways to retrofit rubber tyres. I was one of those people.

I did my research online at first to see what and how other people had done. Result: Zero.

I also asked fellow traction engine builders about the subject and did some trial tests myself.

Apart from how to cut rubber sheet 20mm thick (a subject in itself) the main challenge seemed to be how to ‘stick’ the rubber to the existing steel wheels.

Superglue Ideas, Challenges and Challengers – Video

As soon as I had put forward my intention to use superglue to fix the rubber I was met with a barrage of comments challenging my decision. Well, I had started already and what followed was very interesting and informative (to me anyway).

To explain all this in a ‘digestible’ format I made a YouTube video of the whole process and issue and you can see it on YouTube or in the same video below.