Straightening bent rims

[gatesj at twcny.rr.com (John K. Gates)]

On Thu, 15 Jul 2004, Allyn wrote:

> > It seems like
> > you'd at least want a piece of wood between the wheel and the hammer
>
> not needed with a rubber dead blow. as long as the surface is clean you will
> do no damage to the wheel.
>
> > that might be a little unsafe because of rebound..
>
> but dead blow hammers dont rebound. thats the idea behind the 'dead' part.

Right, exactly, what I meant to say is that a deadblow sounded more
appropriate for an alloy, if you were going to use a regular iron BFH
you'd want a piece of wood...

> just as an example, i straightened a snowflake for Foxx at cincy this year.
> even using rons dead blow (less weight than mine) it only took a few good
> hits. vw rims (teardrops, snowflakes, etc) are *much* easier to straighten
> than steel wheels. they are softer, and easily bent straight with a dead
> blow. there are some alloy wheels that are harder to straighten. the rieger
> wheels are a funky spun aluminum that has high flexibility / yield strength
> and they just keep bouncing back to their bent shape. to overcome the yield
> it takes some serious wailing, but they do in fact straighten.

The spun aluminum sounds almost like steel to work with?  More elastic
region even?

I'm curious, are we talking about straightening rims with a bent in bead
seat or wheels that don't spin true anymore?  Can you really straighten an
untrue wheel with a deadblow?

> side note - you want the heaviest dead blow possible, with a narrow impact
> surface if possible (~2" diameter works pretty good). also, it actually
> helps if the tire is mounted on the rim, as it adds more weight to dampen
> out the impacts.

Maybe my deadblow is really light.  I have one of those plastic ones
with the moving weight inside.  How many pounds is yours and what design?

John K. Gates
--
'97 Jetta GLX - daily driver
'85 Scirocco Flash Silver, waiting for my new house/shop for a complete
teardown/buildup sometime soon...