Overview and Notes
Today we’re gonna talk about wheels, and why we don’t want these… These are The Widow Maker!
What we have on the trailer is really old wheels. I’m sure this wheel is from 1956… and possibly the tire is from 1956 as well. This thing is really old! There’s cracks and ZERO tread. They are horrible, yet it holds air and we actually towed the trailer to our house on these wheel.
The wheels actually don’t look too bad. With a little wire brushing and elbow grease they would clean up pretty good. But… there is a problem with these wheels… they are split rim wheels.
We asked Haley’s dad (who has been in the automotive biz for years) about these. We told him we had these weird wheel that were split rim, and that we didn’t think we would be able to get anyone to put new tires on them. He said, “Oh, your have yourself a widow maker!”
Of course we had no idea what he was talking about, but these are really dangerous. Apparently, the split rim wheel has the reputation of blowing up and killing people. We really don’t want to deal with that, so these wheels are going away… altogether. We are not saving these wheels. The potential to kill us is a major factor in replacing these, but we also don’t know if we could get anyone to fix our tire if we had a problem out on the road. Your neighborhood tire shop won’t touch them.
After doing some research there are some specialty shops that will work on them, but there aren’t that many and you have to put them in a cage to work on them. It’s very specialized. They put them in a cage for your own protection… like a wild animal… so we are playing it safe and get new wheels.
Not only are we getting new wheels for the trailer, we are also getting an extra wheel for our spare. This is great because sometime down the road if we get a flat tire we can pop on the spare and it will look and work great. And a big plus is that we won’t be stranded since our trailer has a single axel and if we have one tire that is not working, we won’t be stuck.
So, we need to get rid of these split rims and ridiculously old tires! We contacted the gang down at Vintage Trailer Supply and ordered new wheels. The new wheels are 15 inches wide, 6 lugs, and pretty much exactly like the old ones… EXCEPT… the new wheels won’t kill us!
So… with new wheels we are now thinking about tires… hmmm… decisions, decisions.
BONUS: Why does our Airstream have such a sad social life?
Because it’s single and two (too) tired!
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