KNOW YOUR LIGHTWEIGHT WHEELS!
Although they come with a price tag lightweight wheels are an incredibly easy way to spruce up your machine. But what is the science behind them? Well we caught up with giles Harwood from HPS to find out…
WORDS: PRETTY BOY PICS: HPS
Tech Talk
Pure sex.
FB: What are lightweight wheels?
GH: In the past, aftermarket/ accessory wheels – ordinarily described as ‘lightweight’ – were manufactured from alloys of aluminium or magnesium, produced by gravity casting or by forging. However unless a wheel is significantly lighter than what it’s replacing, it isn’t really lightweight at all! You have to be careful nowadays with metal wheels as what some guys have bought as lightweight wheels occasionally turned out to be heavier than original equipment!
FB: Why is that?
GH: Because motorcycle manufacturers naturally know that the benefits of having the lightest wheels are massive (more of this later). They have lately often produced their original-equipment (OE) wheels by high-pressure die-casting (where molten aluminium is injected very rapidly into a mould with often very narrow/ thin flow passages) so that standard wheels can now actually be lighter than what might have been described as ‘lightweight’ aftermarket wheels in the recent past.