The last place you want to find a nail is anywhere near your wheels and tires, but that didn’t stop the crew at YouTube’s Garage 54 from flipping that assumption completely upside-down. Turns out, you can make an oddly convincing set of vintage-style wire wheels with some long nails and some welding skills.
Garage 54 hollowed out a steel wheel section-by-section to weld in 100 nails for spokes one-by-one.
What’s impressive is that they even took the time to polish it up a bit and paint it black. They even found some scrap metal to simulate an old-school knock-off hub in the center even though their steelie had lugnuts. The spokes are offset from each other to give it that realistic spoke-wheel look.
From farther away, it looks the part! The black hides the welds pretty well, but it’s a pretty cool looking wheel despite the fact that it’s a pretty janky idea. If the lugnuts had been black, you would have had to see the wheels from pretty close-up to know that something was strange about them.
Best of all, it works without a single popped tire in sight. The host didn’t even feel any wobbles or pull, although he speculates that rough roads and having different wheels on each side might be borking the results.
Either way, these are the only nails I want near my tires.
We’ll have to stay tuned as Garage 54 plans to refine their nail-spoked wheel design. Wire wheels really deserve to be shiny, so up next is a chrome version.
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