A NEW AMERICAN RESILIENT WHEEL.
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Many attempts have been made from time to time
to provide means whereby road shocks may be inter-cepted before reaching the axles, in a fuller manner than is done by the solid tyres now in use, which, it must be admitted, are possessed of very little resilience. Most of these attempts' have employed cushions of rubber, or air, or springs embodied in the wheel construction.
The Sendelbach resilient wheel is the latest to make its appearance—in the U.S.--and employs soft rubber cushions to obtain resilience, but, unlike most others, in which the cushions -were arranged around the hub, in the Sendelbach wheel the cushions are positioned on the inside of the rim, ass is clearly shown in the accompanying illustrations. There are a dozen wide wooden spokes radiating from the hub, and these are so broad that they touch each other and form between them a continuous sacface—almost a disc wheel, in fact. Every other spoke is longer by several inches than its neighbour, and its sides at the outer extremity are cut away in arcs of circles. The opposing arcs, together with the even contour of the intervening. spokes, form flat arches or recesses just at the back of the rim, in each of which are inserted a pair of round rubber pads or cushions, 1336 each cushion having a certain amount of TO= for free movement in the direction of the run of the rim. The cushions, however, are prevented from coming in contact with each other by separators attached to flanges bolted to projections formed on the back of the rim, or fclloe. Similar rings, or flanges, are bolted to the spokes, the inner and outer edges of these rings being a short distance apart, which allows of a certain amount of free movement towards and away from each other. The elongated ends of the alternate spokes, which keep the two in connection and 'work freely within the, outer flanges, are furnished with short steel strips to take the wear.
An ordinary pressed-on solid rubber tyre encircles the wheel on the outside, and the resilience is obtained by the flattening or compression of the six pair of pads as the weight, comes consecutively npon them. The wheels are made in sizes from 22 ins. to 40 ins. in diameter.