Where to get plastic tires/wheels?
I see lots of aftermarket wheels with rubber tires but no plastic hot wheels plastic tires with the exception of red line style.
Anyone have a good link to a supplier or am I stuck with buying cars and harvesting them?
Thanks!
FredD
F'D Racing
Discussion
Mostly stuck to buying cars and stealing them but I have seen the occasional plastic wheels on Ebay
- Thanks... I hate the thought of stealing plastic wheels off new cars but I guess I could always replace them with the new fangled aluminum and rubber style! — FredD
- whats terrible is buying $20 worth of cars just to steal the wheels, and the hulls go in the bucket. — dr_dodge
- At a $1 a set it’s the most affordable way — BlueLineRacing
Here's how I get over the inefficiency of it, lol - if HW chose to sell a pack of just plastic wheels, they wouldn't necessarily be any better quality that those taken off of donors. They wouldn't be rounder or more flawless...they'd be the same wheels and they wouldn't come with axles. So any savings on the effort of cracking open a donor for wheels would be spent cracking open donors for axles.
Old McWheely had a farm...
Just buy mainlines. It's like a buck and some change. Harvest your wheels and axles from them. Even if you could find plastic wheels online, they'd be $5-$10 a set or more. It sucks throwing away the whole car just for a set of wheels, but it's still much cheaper.
Best deal for wheels is getting spare mainlines that you wouldn't normally get - they're a buck and a quarter, come on now .......Those fantasy cars you just passed by have some pretty good wheels on them. Extra bonus: think of the diecast junkyard you can create with all the empty shells!
- True enough... guess I will be buying some more cars... ???????????? — FredD
- I have an interesting idea what to do with the debris, cast them into a clear acrylic sculpture — dr_dodge
- @dr: well, over at Gaslands they make the debris into a Truckosaurus-type monstrosity for the track. Think of junked Destructicons or Constructicins I to this big menacing figure made from cars and trucks and whatnot. — SpyDude
- @spy do the same thing, but cast it into a shape (creature, cube, etc) so it would stay together as the glues degrade — dr_dodge
- would last forever — dr_dodge
There is a site called: ModMyRide. They sell plastic wheels with axels. The tires are black and they have multiple rim colors. I've oredered from there and the wheels were great. The only down side is they only had one size wheel, which was a small front wheel size. The axels are easy to work with too.
Try a local flea market. If you can find anyone selling loose cars in a box, they'll typically go for between .50 to $1 each. One big advantage is you can test the wheels to see if they are any good before buying, something you can't do with a new one in the package. You'll learn what to look for in wheels, most of them do not have perfectly round center holes and wobble a little on the axle. Once you find a good one it will spin smoothly and for a little longer than the others. Now it's a bit of a crap shoot on how straight the axles on loose cars are, but if you're making you're own anyway it won't matter. You're just looking for good wheels. Even so, I usually find plenty of loose modern cars with good axles since these are made a little thicker than earlier hot wheels and these would be great cheap cars to practice/learn with, even if the wheels aren't perfect. There are some good threads on here with what to look for as well as some YouTube videos.
farmin' is the only way
so, till up that orange track and plant some wheels and wait for harvests
it's time to plant winter wheels now
lol
dr