How To Make Your Own Wood Steering Wheel - Page 3

Making Progress with our Wood Steerng Wheel Project

Remember the thin wood pieces? We glued them up into a large enough blank for the bottom of the steering wheel "sandwich." Once the blank was ready, we laid the top wood circle onto the blank and drew lines to create a matching circle on the thin wood. More cutting ensued, leaving us with a nice bottom layer for our wood wheel "sandwich."

The thin wood, in the Jaguar's case a complementary mahogany, is glued up.

Getting fancy: We decided to create an inlay of red mahogany for the front of the Jaguar and Corvette wheels. This is being done on the Corvette wheel.

With the inner and outer wood shells, transitions and steel rim channels created, we arrived at the next step, the tedious business of shaping, sanding and detailing the wood wheel. To do so we assembled the two "sandwich" pieces together and clamped them (masking tape, actually) securely in a couple locations. The reason for this is obvious: we have a circular wood wheel, but in cross-section it's square. We need to create the smooth, round, ovoid shape that will be the finished wheel.

To start the process, we put a round-over bit in the router, set the fence and ran the wood rim sandwich around, avoiding the two places where the pieces were taped together. When done, we taped the pieces in another two spots, then rounded off the remaining areas. This yielded us a rounded wood wheel that was almost ready for a couple hours of sanding and hand work.

Almost?

Yes, almost. It was time to insert the steel rim into the wood channel and then glue up the "sandwich." We laid in a bead of construction glue (Liquid Nails, etc.) in the bottom of the channel, then pressed in the steel rim, filling the voids with more glue. We let it set up overnight to create a super-strong steering wheel that relies on the construction glue to provide structure, avoiding stress on the [relatively] weak glue joints in the wood.

The Jaguar wheel is glued and clamped.

Once cured, it was time to glue the two wood rims together. First, we scraped off any glue that sat above the level of the channel, then liberally applied wood glue to the surfaces. We laid them together and put as many clamps on the assembly as possible.

The Falcon wheel is glued and clamped.