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.......................................--- Rear Wheel Spacer ---

I decided to go ahead and make a 5/8 inch wheel spacer for the right wheel. With this addition the distance to the body from the inner planes of the rear wheels will be the same on both sides and the car will be perfectly (well close) symmetrical. If you don't remember this was necessitated due to the fact that the rear is offset to one side for the chain/sprocket.


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I started with a round piece of aluminum Hooley got for me. It was slightly less than 6 inches in diameter and about 8 inches long. I put it in the 4 jaw chuck of my lathe and turned the end so it has a center protrusion that will be the wheel locator (left side above). To the right of that I turned the circumference just enough to clean it up. Then I made a cut 5/8 inch back (thickness of spacer) and widened that cut and cut as far as I could into the center to cut the finished piece off of the blank.

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I had to finish cutting through the piece with my wood band saw that I converted to a metal band saw. It works, but it was slow going and took over an hour to cut through.


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Next I reversed the piece in the 4-jaw chuck and proceeded to make the back side of the spacer flat with a final thickness of 5/8 inch. Above I'm just turning the waste off after the saw cut.

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I proceeded to also cut a relief into the spacer that will index on the hub where the wheel use to index.


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Using the mill and indexing table I drilled the four holes for the lug bolts.

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Here is the finished back side of the spacer.

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The spacer on the hub. I'm going to replace the rear lugs with larger and longer 1/2 inch ones.

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Here the wheel is mounted and you can see how the center of the spacer indexes the wheel. Now that I have the rear finished enough to get a track width I can go back and continue working on the front axle and make the front track width the same as the back.
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