boring out wheels?

i picked up some alloy wheels off an old bronco.
the bolt pattern is correct but they dont fit over the hubs in the front because the center hole is not big enough.
does anyone have experience boring out the center hole r have a easy way to do this?
is this even safe to do?

 

I have done it on several wheels before. Unless you have a large lathe or milling machine the average joe will not be able to do this. I do it on the mill at work, I can do it on mine but the mill at work has a much smoother boring feed than my old clunker does.

 

well i dont have anything of that sort at home or at the shop i work at. how much do you think a machine shop would charge for sumthin like this? ive heard people say anything from 50 bucks to 500 dollars. i couldnt imagine it could cost anything over 100 bucks

 

I did a set of Dodge wheels several years back and charged the guy $80 for 4 wheels. It took about 2 hours to do them.

 

thats not bad. ima go talk to the guy at the local shop here today

 

Years ago I had some Dodge wheels that the center was too small. Lacking a lathe or a mill or ca$h to pay, I pulled it up to a wall, chocked and blocked three of the wheels and jacked up the right rear. Blocked it well and put it in gear, trying to use it as a lathe. Worked about as well as you might have suspected. It was cutting but quite slow. Since JEEP wheels are lug centric, not hub centered all you really need is to scribe a nice line a use a die grinder to clearance. Still will take some time.

 

yea this is gunnna be a street driven jeep tho i wanna make sure that everything is gunna be inbalance. im all about redneck engineering but i like to know when its somthing important that its gunna be right.

 

thats sounds like a good idea. i have a roto zip thing that cuts perfect holes.
think theres some kinda way i could make that work?

 

A simple job for someone with a suitable lathe and a boring bar, back in the day I coulda whipped out a set in no time. I used to LOVE being a machinist, just didn't realize it at the time. Used to make all kinds of cool stuff.

But nowadays, just finding a shop that will even take it on work like this is the tough part. The days of the small job-shops are pretty much over, at least around Denver. I just had my drums drilled and I had to hire a gunsmith to do it, the machine shops wouldn't touch 'em.

 

man ud think work is work no matter how small the job. money is money

 

To peons like us, that's true. But to shop owners with hundreds of thousands of dollars tied up in equipment, they want the big-buck production jobs. Some schmuck like me wanting a bunch of little holes in some brake drums as cheaply as possible is just an annoyance to them. They'd rather be cranking out parts from their CNC machines as fast as they can.

Money isn't just money, there's BIG money and little money. Guess where we fall?

When I was a machinist back in Oklahoma, we did big-bucks production and oilfield repair work too, but we still made sure to fit in the little guys like farmers and car fanatics, we knew they needed stuff done and it was important to them. They'd come back again, too.

 

yea i gotcha. well hit the big money one day. lol. right now id take any kind of money i can find lol

 

Ever see a job in a 4"x4"x2" box that was worth $30,000 and weighed less than 2lbs. I have done a lot of them over the years, built several that were worth over $100,000 (over 20 years ago) that weighed less than 175lbs.

 

at exactly was this insanely expesive peice of metal?

 

Replacement parts to a mold that made anti lock brake housings. There was something like 650-700 hours worth of work in around 35 small inserts in this box. The piece of steel is not what makes it expesnive its the time and effort it akes to maek something. It always amazes me when people don't really think much ofspending $70-80 and hour to have there car worked on bya mechanic that may have $40-50,000 in tools but won't pay $50 an hour to have a company with 2 million dollars worth of tools make something that takes 25-100 hours to build.

 

When I was doing production work back in the 70's, I'd often think about the parts I was making, and that I was only one guy, doing one operation to them. Then think about all the other operations to be done by who knows how many other guys, plus inspection and warehousing, not to mention tooling, and I'd often wonder just how damn expensive those things were. And these were just parts for truck-mounted water drilling rigs.

 

lol i wasnt around in the 70s. or the 80s for that matter. but i feel where ya coming from.
btw back to the wheel subject. is there a way i could put a different hub to compensate for the wheel?
mabee somthing out the junkyard r sumthing

 

A lathe with large swing is probably the most efficient way to do it. like mentioned before some of the big shops might not like to take small jobs like that. However, if you look in a few non-straight forward places you might find what you're looking for. For instance, machine shops aren't the only ones with these type of machine. Gunsmiths also prefer to have big lathes ( for the large spindle bore). So if you have a local small gunsmith he might be willing to help you out. I'm a gunsmith and i get requests for these small machine jobs all the time and i don't mind at all taking them in if it's something i'm set up for.
Other alternatives would be pretty much any vertical knee milling machine w/turn table or a welder/fabricator with a turn table and a plasma/ oxy-fuel cutting set up.

 

about 1971 i came up with a set of 2wd 10" wide rims to fit a ford truck that i needed on my cj3b. we chucked a broken ford truck axle up in the lathe, then run the register on the axle flange off so it would not interfere with the cutter on the holder. then we bolted the wheels to the axle & bored away. we used the tailstock to keep everything in line & the shop teacher welded the tool holder up for us as it was kinda tight fit with the tailstock in the way. but we gotter done!
andy