Paul continues to make progress on his jeep. He received his tires and has made some custom stainless rim discs.

Paul’s new tires

TIRES:

He writes, “The New Tire Fairy arrived at the house today with eight brand new STA Super Traxion 6.50-16 tires along with eight new inner tubes for the little Willys. I’d been searching the internet for a vintage looking narrow tire with an aggressive tread design that would look good on the Willys so shortly after I discovered these tires I put my credit card to work and placed my order.

I wanted to replace the brand new but 30 year old tires on the Willys so that accounted for 5 tires and I needed 3 more tires for the military trailer (I want the trailer to have it’s own spare tire) so that’s why I bought eight. Shipping wasn’t too expensive since I wasn’t in a hurry and compared to Coker tire who wanted to ship their tires 2nd day air ($1,100 for the tires and an additional $900 for shipping) it was down right reasonable by Alaska standards.”

WHEEL DISCS:

In this photo he’s testing out the disc concept with poster board.

He writes, “I bought some poster board that was large enough to make full size mock ups of the stainless steel wheel covers I’m thinking of making to cover the plain steel wheels I’ll be using on the Willys. The six larger holes are 1 & 1/2 “ diameter and the smaller holes are 1 “ in diameter. I’ve made other discs, some with more holes and some with less holes on each disc in various patterns but I keep coming back to this design. It’s simple, the spacing of the holes is easy on my eyes and the wheel covers make the tires appear larger and more heavy duty.

Each hole will have a reinforcing ring fastened to the back side of the disc either by 1/8th inch diameter monel raised head style rivets or 3/16” dimeter stainless steel machine screws (the size of the machine screws used on the door just below the window). These doublers and rivets are for style only and not necessary for strength. Each disc will be attached to a wheel by six stainless machine screws and these screws will thread into steel mounts welded to the wheels.”

A completed disc.

“Above is the first wheel disc with the holes drilled and the rivets installed. I gave the plain disc a brushed finish to see what it would look like … I think it’s about as close as I can come to matching the body finish. These wheel discs need to be easy to clean and easy to touch up the finish so a mirror polished disc would require lots of maintenance to keep the metal shiny. I don’t have enough energy to keep up with the mirror finish. 

I finished riveting the last two wheel discs today then I cut a hole thru the center of the front wheel disc slightly larger than the Warn hub so these discs could be test fitted to the wheels on the Willys. The tires on the Willys are still the old new ones and not the new, new ones I recently received since the steel wheels currently on the Willys have the wrong offset and will be replaced with the correct wheels in the near future. Anyway, I think these discs match the Willys much better than the aluminum wheels I was originally planning on using.”

The wheel discs attached. The discs came out a little darker, but that’s probably because of the angle. The discs are made of the same stainless as the rest of the jeep. These are the old tires, not the new ones.