Making Wheels Round

I've started throwing my lite flite wheels on a lathe after noticing that many of them are fairly badly out of round by the time they're able to be installed on a shaft. An added side bonus is more options for wheel diameter and width, as well as much more consistent driving performance.

There's still a visible indent in the wheel after taking a decent amount of material off of the tread.

After taking even more material the tread surface is uniform and concentric to the shaft.

Image showing the depth of cut to get a uniform tread. Wheels are standard 1.75" lite flites.

Side-by-side of the old and new wheels.

All four turned wheels for Motor City Massacre.

These wheels are for Kobalos, and  were the same part number. You can see the newer wheels are much thinner and barely reach both sides of the plastic hub.

I also take a file to both edges of the wheels to smooth out the corners, however it seemed unsafe to try to file a wheel down while it was spinning in the lathe while taking a picture and I didn't feel like tracking down a tripod.