Fitting A Bicycle Wheel To A Car

Last week we stumbled upon Garage 54’s YouTube channel and this week we’ve found yet another awesome video from the… we’ll call him “offbeat” Russian mechanic where he’s taken to the comments on his other videos to find inspiration for yet another project.

In this video, he’s taken the wheels off of a car and replaced them with bicycle wheels and tires. I’ll say right up front, this didn’t go the way I saw it going at all. I’m no expert on bicycles or spoked wheels, but I just expected something built to hold a couple hundred pounds to immediately fail under the weight of an actual car, even one this small and lightweight.

However, the wheels actually held the weight of the car, at least long enough to set it on the ground. The only real issue was that one of the rear tires warped, presumably because it was lowered first and had more weight on it, plus it was at an odd angle due to the other side of the car still being on the jack at the time. Once the car was sitting back on flat ground though, everything looked to be okay.

After a couple of tweaks to keep the wheels tight on the hand-built adapter plates, the car is even able to move under its own power, although our host wisely decides not to go very far at all. Instead, he opts to have everybody on the property climb on the car to add weight and even then, the wheels hold up remarkably well. It’s only after everybody starts shifting their weight around that the front wheels finally buckle and drop the car to the ground.

The rears, which aren’t supporting the weight of the engine, still hold up, so he decides to see what it takes to get them – well at least one of them – to spin. After some coaxing, the tire finally begins to spin and makes for quite a smoke show.

Experiments like this are a lot of fun, we can’t wait to see what Garage 54 comes up with next!