Cutting down wheels - making them narrower

[Coelacanth]

I was wondering if anyone here has experience & ideas for cutting down wheels to make them less wide? I've seen a few wheel designs that look great, but they're for crawlers. On the other hand, they're the same diameter and hex, so cutting down the inside parts of the rims would work nicely.

Cutting down an inside ring to narrow the wheel is the easy part. I've seen some online how-to's where the guy cuts off a middle section, then re-glues the outer & inner halves together--but I question how durable that would be.

Once you've cut off the inner ring with the tire bead lips, it occurred to me that all one would have to do is CA-glue something around the inner part of the rim to make new bead lips, some kind of plastic or nylon rings. Heck, a zip-tie might suffice to form the inner bead...but that wouldn't look so great for the outer bead.

Has anyone tried this?

[THEYTOOKMYTHUMB]

I know m_vice did something like that (and probably others that I haven't seen). I would think when possible that cutting the mid-section out of the rim would have the most esthetic value. That way it would appear as the same wheel as before, just more narrow. Then you could reinforce the outside (and possibly even the inside) of the rim with CA and any sort of bendable material. Just my thoughts...

EDIT: I think if I'd said topside and when possible bottomside of rim, it would be clearer as to what I'm talking about.

[klavy69]

how much are you talking about cutting out?

one of our locals did this with some buggy wheels. He cut the outer bead and 'flat' off so that the inner part of the bead was actually the outer bead when finished. He did this on the inner part of the wheel but if you aren't concerned about looks you could do that to both sides of the wheel so that you could narrow them down by 1/4". Oh, and he used the part he cut off as the inner bead by regluing them to the rim after some tedious dremel work.
Todd

[Jay Dub]

BITD we used to narrow our rims all the time. It was very popular for the early 4wd cars to use a rear rim with the outer bead cut off. This made a "front" rim that was wider than the std front rims available at the time. Also for a time we were adding width to 2wd front rims to flatten the tires. You ended up sacrificing a set of rims, but if you wanted to go fast . All the work was done with CA, and I never had a problem. It glues the Nylon extremely well. -Jeff

[LowClassCC]

i did this to run some old losi staggered rib tires on my b4 when i had the track in my backyard. this prevented me from destroying the new soft compound tires just for some backyard practice. ll i did was cut off the inner ring off the b4 wheel and it became the perfect width.

in order from left to right
cut down b4 wheel
vintage losi wheel
stock width b4 wheel

never had any issues or problems with the wheels.

[Coelacanth]

Thanks for the replies, guys! I actually think I would need to remove both inner lips, so the question becomes how does one fabricate a new lip?

[jwscab]

well, if you had a lathe, you could chuck the wheel and trim the wheel in such a way as to cut the 'meat' of the rim off and save the ring, then slide it on the wheel and glue where necessary.

alternatively, a bit of time with a dremel with a cut off ring would do the same thing.

a tire wrap sounds interesting too, maybe install, glue, then cut off the latch part.