Adding wood to the steering wheel
Posted: May 20th, 2016, 8:53 am
So... for my 1994 Concourse...
I'd already made my own wood dash, just for fun... and to save $150 buying a fake one, which is what I'd usually do. But I was missing having a partial wood steering wheel, like in my Jeep Commander Overland.
So I decided to finally try to learn how to add wood to a steering wheel, something I'd always wanted to do.
I went on eBay and bought a spare wheel for about $60 to work on. Then I hit Sears and bought a router + table for $100. A dozen blocks of cherry for $30 came from eBay, too. I already had stain and urethane from the dash project.
I searched the internet for tutorials, but the few examples were about making a fully round wood wheel, which in some ways is actually much easier to do. (Easier to make circular jigs than the arc I needed; no need to match ends, etc.) In the end, I had to come up with a lot of the method myself.
Anyway, long story short, after about a month of working on it a little bit a day, here's the result. I bought a steering wheel puller, removed the original wheel, and replaced it with my custom one:
The short version of all the steps is:
The long version can be seen on my Pinterest page devoted to this wheel:
https://www.pinterest.com/kkadarling/di ... ing-wheel/
Now I can take the original wheel, and try to do a top AND bottom wood section on it.
Cheers!
Kev
I'd already made my own wood dash, just for fun... and to save $150 buying a fake one, which is what I'd usually do. But I was missing having a partial wood steering wheel, like in my Jeep Commander Overland.
So I decided to finally try to learn how to add wood to a steering wheel, something I'd always wanted to do.
I went on eBay and bought a spare wheel for about $60 to work on. Then I hit Sears and bought a router + table for $100. A dozen blocks of cherry for $30 came from eBay, too. I already had stain and urethane from the dash project.
I searched the internet for tutorials, but the few examples were about making a fully round wood wheel, which in some ways is actually much easier to do. (Easier to make circular jigs than the arc I needed; no need to match ends, etc.) In the end, I had to come up with a lot of the method myself.
Anyway, long story short, after about a month of working on it a little bit a day, here's the result. I bought a steering wheel puller, removed the original wheel, and replaced it with my custom one:
https://www.pinterest.com/kkadarling/di ... ing-wheel/
Now I can take the original wheel, and try to do a top AND bottom wood section on it.
Cheers!
Kev