Things have been rolling forward in the background with the rims, but I just didn’t feel that there were enough to post updates about, I’ve been keeping silent.
Anyways, the rims for the 8" tires have been working great and since the first version with the big 6301 bearings. I later did a little testing with the rolling friction of the bearings themselves between the 6301 (12x37x12) and the more common MBS sized 6001 (12x28x8) and figured out that I can get a bit more range with the 6001s as they roll a bit better, although that might also partially be because the SKF 6301s that I used were of the model 6301-2RSH, the ‘H’ at the end standing for “heavy duty”-seals, which I suspect might increase the rolling resistance a little bit for the better sealing seals.
I also have this freak unit, which was the first one I printed for the 6001 bearings. It has the smaller 6001 bearing, but I forgot to shrink the size of the center section, which is still sized for the 6301, but has the 6001 pocket size, so it looks a bit… big.
I also did a little precursory test for widening the rims, based on the talk on this thread:
I just added a little extra spacer bit between the front and back side of the rim (printed in yellow), just to see how the tire behaved when pumped up, but haven’t actually ridden on them. It also causes the valve stem hole to get more offset. I think I would have added a bigger spacer, but I didn’t have any longer 5M bolts, so they were the limiting factor how much I could actually add spacing.
Now we finally get to the more recent… bigger things… Rims for 10 Inch tires. The tires are from aliexpress:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32726828368.html
I had originally prototyped the barrel of the rim with 10 bolts, but it was a bit too dense/busy, so I decided to go for 8 bolts instead and 4 spoke design.
I am currently happy with the design and I am going to need to order more filament to print them for all 4 corners.
Slightly improved design, which was optimized for printing.
