I've volunteered to repair an old wagon wheel for a friend. Seems like its been in the family for over a hundred years and he wants to make it a prominent part of his backyard that he is redoing and landscaping. Anyway, I watched a utube on how they are made and it looks like this one is typical of the way the made them years ago. Most of the spokes seem to be relatively solid but, lots of the outer segments are not. That's the part that I will be replacing, not all but probably 5-6 of them that are rotten. Each segment with a spoke going to the center is doweled to the two adjacent segments and each spoke is tenoned into the segment. Then, the steel rim is heated to expand it and put on, when cooled it shrinks onto the wooden wheel. Although only decorative (obviously), the wheel probably weighs about 150 lbs. As the rotten outer segments are the ones I will be replacing, I plan to just drill and chisel them away (I'm guessing they will just crumble). I've made a pattern to bandsaw new replacement pieces out of either cedar or douglas fir. My question is how to secure them between the spoke and steel rim. As I can't put dowels between them nor fit them over the spoke tenon, I thought that I'd just cut off any dowel or tenon stubs and slide the new ones in place with epoxy both from the spoke to the segment, between segments and also where the the segment is against the steel rim.
As this whole thing has me scratching my head, I'm open to any suggestions on how to go about this. Thanks. Randy
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