Today I spent about 5 hours fitting the solid tyres to the wheels that I have just built up. Even though I have built 9 previous replica ordinaries before, this was still a learning process as I had never used the American style wired on tyre's before as previously I used the British type with the internal cork screw wire . I am using a Simpson tire machine from NZ and some stainless steel 2mm wire with silver solder & liquid flux. The rear wheel was pretty easy and it didn't take too long to get it fitted but after doing a nice job on soldering it and joining it together I discovered that it should have been a lot tighter on the rim. It looks great in the photo but for my liking it's not tight enough so I will saw the wire in half at work in the bench vice and re fit some more wire and solder it back together again. The pictures above show the wiring process of the rear wheel. After I had soldered it together I cleaned it up with my faithful hand held Proxxon which is a Dremel type tool with a small grinding stone to give a nice smooth finish. As for the large wheel I almost had it tight enough on the rim when one of the wire clamps slipped causing the tyre to come off, so to save trouble next time I'm going to buy two small vice grips and use those instead to hold the wire while tightening it. A great deal of tension is required to hold the tyre onto the rim and it's very important that it cannot come off the rim or otherwise a serious accident could occur.
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