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Old 11-28-2005, 11:23 AM   #7 (permalink)
BadNick
Riding the Ocean Spray
 
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Location: S.E. PA in U Sofa
That was quite interesting, thanks, I never saw that vid.

The "mag" wheels in this vid were all made from aluminum, no magnesium that I saw or heard of in that vid. There are still a couple of companies that make actual magnesium wheels for cars, mostly for minimum weight like for hardcore racing. I looked into forged magnesium wheels a while back for auto racing purposes and they cost almost $2000 each wheel. Real mag wheels are somewhat more common on high performance motorcycles.

As far as I know, Rays wheels are well above average quality and strength, especially their forged wheels shown in the first part of that vid; later they also covered their cast wheels. When I was in Ontario Canada a few years ago, near Kitchner, I visited a wheel manufacturing facility that made mostly OEM car and truck wheels and their methods didn't impress me nearly as much as that, except for the huge number of wheels they made. Being a car nut, I've also seen in person shops that make custom billet wheels like some of you above mentioned they saw on the TV shows; I also saw some those TV shows, but I don't recall any of them using specialized forgings (or even castings) like shown on the Rays vid. The car and bike shows I've seen all made billet wheels from a generic blank of forged metal typically cut from a larger forged bar or rod and then machine it to their design, which is not nearly as good/strong as a custom forging with the "metal flow lines" and grain structure advantages described in the Rays vid.
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