Artillery wheel

The artillery wheel was a nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century style of wagon, gun carriage, and automobile wheel. Rather than having its spokes mortised into a wooden nave (hub), it has them fitted together in a keystone fashion with miter joints, bolted into a two-piece metal nave. Its tyre is shrunk onto the rim in the usual way, but it may also be bolted on for security.

The design evolved over the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and was ultimately imitated in drawn steel for auto wheels, which sometimes show little immediate resemblance to most of their design ancestry.

Wood artillery wheels

Wheels with wood spokes fitted together in a keystone fashion with

This wheel design that came to be called artillery wheels was extensively used with artillery.

Wood-spoke artillery wheels were used on early automobiles, as a stronger alternative to wire wheels.^[5] By the 1920s, many motor cars used wheels that looked at a glance like wooden artillery wheels, but which were of cast steel or welded from steel pressed sections. These too were usually called artillery wheels. Whether wood, pressed steel, or wire wheels were preferred varied greatly in different markets.

British cars

Though Sankey did not market their steel wheels as artillery wheels, the term Sankey wheels was used interchangeably with steel artillery wheels by 1930.[8] Sankey belatedly, circa 1935, publicly recognized the connection of their steel wheels to artillery wheels.^[9]

US cars

In the 1930s, US manufacturers, whose markets often preferred wheels of substantial appearance, moved to stamped steel wheels which imitated large-hub artillery wheels. Ford Motor Company adopted this in 1935, Chevrolet brought out its now iconic wheel in 1936. These wheels were based on large-hub wheels, and do not superficially resemble most small-hub wood wheels.^[10]

Gallery

• Artillery wheels
• 
  1908 aftermarket pressed and welded detachable steel wheel on a 1907 Austin
• 
  4WD steam car with artillery wheels, c. 1918
• 
  A 1927 Humber with steel artillery wheels
• 
  A 1927

  Ford T

  with wood artillery wheels}
• 
  Later steel artillery wheels were often based on large-hub wood designs like this
• 
  double solid tire wheel

See also

• Cart wheel

References