Why did Early Cars have Wooden Spoke wheels like Covered Wagons?

Metal wheels on cars that you put tubes and tires onto were only practical when there were enough paved roads and cement roads built to drive on. And that point was not really reached in the U.S. until around 1930. It was only after about 1925 or 1930 that metal wheels on cars actually became practical. Before this, wooden spoke wheels were actually better (with the present technology available then) for driving on the dirt and rock roads outside of larger towns. And on these roads you couldn't keep your vehicle road worthy at speeds much above 25 miles per hour in the best of circumstances. Especially in the west (West of Colorado) for example, there were no real paved roads to speak of much outside of the larger cities. So, if you went to drive from Los Angeles to Texas it was mostly going to be dirt roads and rock covered roads at best. And if weather was bad you might want to take a train or a bi-plane or something like that because you were going to get stuck in the mud, especially if it was an area with a lot of clay in the soil. So, when traveling cross country in weather likely a train ride was the safest way to travel west of Colorado until the 1930s or 1940s in the western United States.

Even when I was a child it took 3 days to travel by car from San Diego to Mt. Shasta when I was 5 years old. Now you might make it in 10 or 12 hours. 10 from Los Angeles and 12 from San Diego if you are driving really fast. But, for example, even driving direct from San Francisco it's about 5 hours at least still by car.

Why did it take 3 days in 1953 to get from San Diego to Mt. Shasta? In 1953 Interstate 5 hadn't been built yet. So, the drive because of this was about 6 hours from the San Fernando Valley to Bakersfield over the Grapevine. Then it was another 4 or 5 hours up from Redding to Mt. Shasta through another windey windey road too. So, in the end you might make it in two 15 hour days of driving but we found it easier to do it in 3 days from San Diego to Mt. Shasta with my father and a friend of ours who drove us in her car (an old 1949 Dodge) then. Also, you had to be more careful then of boilovers (no anti-freeze in radiators just water then) and you had to be careful of Brake Fade (no disc brakes that cool better). So, often semi trucks brakes would fade and they would crash in the old days. With Disc brakes now this is much less of a problem than in the 1950s and before.

Also, because Interstate 5 hadn't been built yet over the Grapevine or up from Redding to Ashland, Oregon and beyond, the way to go then was Highway 99 up through Bakersfield. So then you had to drive right through the town of Bakersfield, and through Fresno and Modesto and Merced and Sacramento which slowed your traveling time down a lot too. If you came up the coast route on 101 you also had to drive through towns like Santa Barbara which the freeway on 101 bypasses now too. Just like Interstate 5 now bypasses Bakersfield, Fresno, Modesto and Merced and Sacramento and Red Bluff and Redding and all the rest now too.

Note: If you look at Wooden wheels from an engineering standpoint, wooden wheels were logical because the world had grown very proficient at building wooden wheels over several thousand years of engineering. Metal wheels on Trains were well designed in the early 1900s but not metal wheels for cars and trucks yet. So, it was logical (for awhile at least to lead with wooden wheels which had been used since before ancient Rome on chariots and other vehicles.

So, engineering for car and truck wheels had to evolve alongside of how roads were built. Wooden wheels were better at speeds under 30 mph at the time because Stage Coaches moved sometimes as fast as horses could run which might be 17 to 25 mph. But, when you went above 30 mph and above 45 mph the G forces on the wooden wheels just likely wasn't going to work without adding more and more metal to the wheels. So, eventually creating and all metal wheel for a car or truck was more practical than continuing building wooden wheels when you had both pavement and asphalt roads for the most part all across the U.S. But, you still had to be careful off of main roads with metal wheels because they could bend or dent and go out of balance. But, at least they wouldn't break completely like wooden wheels would under too much stress. So, on older cars they kept a spare wooden wheel when rocks broke one of the wooden wheels. Then they often took the tire and tube off the broken wheel and put it on the new Wooden Wheel and off they went down the road because they also had brought along a tire pump. When tires and wheels weren't as big as now it was easier to use tools to remove a tire and a tube then than now for the average person with enough skills to travel cross country in a vehicle.

It's a lot like early people using personal computers. First only the techs could do this but over time almost anyone could learn to be a user. But, as things change more and more vehicles were designed less and less for drivers participation in fixing them which led to AAA Tow Trucks and AAA memberships for towing vehicles long distances for service to the point now where it is almost easier to have your car worked on by the mechanics where you bought your car in the first place.

For example, I fixed everything on my car or truck until I married my present wife. But then, she preferred to have insurance policies where the vehicle is maintained by where you bought them sometimes for 7 years at a time. Now, for example, I have a brake light out on my Tundra. But, when I looked for screws in the tail light assembly there are none visible. This means that I would have to go into the bed of my truck to change a tail light? This seems crazy to me that I have to go to my dealership to change a Brake Light? In the past growing up until I was in my late 40s I would have gone to NAPA Auto parts, bought the brake light and installed it myself. This is how much things have changed now. Also, every car I owned until 1995 I did almost all my own work on including changing tires, replacing brakes, changing transmissions, replacing spark plugs and many other things as necessary including changing oil filters and oil and lubrication. I even changed an Oil pan on the bottom of my engine when a rock pierced it once when I lived remotely and all the oil drained out.

But, for standard vehicles, even pickup trucks, there is less and less you can do each year to fix your own vehicle without very specialized tools which can be very expensive to buy. There is less and less room in engine compartments to do almost anything to the point where you almost have to remove your engine completely if you want to do anything major on it which also means you have to rent or buy an engine hoist to do this because of the weight of an engine. Then hybrids and electric vehicles bring in whole new elements like (how do you stay alive and not get shocked to death while working on your hybrid or electric vehicle). Because the voltage is high enough on a hybrid or All electric to kill a person easily. And because it is usually direct current it is much easier to die with high direct current than it is with alternating current. So, it's becoming a real mine field for people wanting to work on their own vehicles now.

At least with alternating current it will usually blow you off the short between the cycles. But in direct current there are no cycles and so you would more likely just stay attached and fry instead.

For example, on a normal 12 volt battery system in a regular gasoline engine or diesel engine car it would be very difficult to die from a charge from a 12 volt battery. I don't think even if you were standing in water that you could die from getting in the middle of a short with a 12 volt battery but I could be wrong about this.

Here is the answer from Google regarding this:

Can you get electrocuted by a 12 volt battery?

Your body is just not conductive enough to be fried by 12 volts. Ray: The danger from car batteries is not so much electrocution as it is explosion. If you touch both terminals with a metal wrench, for instance, you can create a spark that can ignite hydrogen gas in the battery.May 11, 2006

Car Talk: Car battery can shock you -- but it wouldn't be terminal ...

https://www.seattlepi.com/news/.../Car-Talk-Car-battery-can-shock-you-but-it-1203143....

Also, I looked up how fast a horse can run in regard to wooden spoke wheels on Stages and Stage coaches
and buggies. Of course it is likely that (unless it was downhill on extremely smooth ground or pavement) stages,
 stage coaches, or buggies were very
unlikely to reach a speed over 30 mph ever.

 

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