The English wheel, in Britain also known as a Wheeling machine, is a metalworking tool that enables a craftsman to form compound (double curvature) curves from flat sheets of metal such as aluminium or steel. The process of using an English wheel is known as Wheeling. Panels produced this way are expensive, due to the highly skilled and labour intensive production method, but it has the key advantage that it can flexibly produce different panels using the same machine. It is a forming machine that works by surface stretching and is related in action to panel beating processes. It is used wherever low volumes of compound curved panels are required; typically in coachbuilding, car restoration, spaceframe chassis racing cars that meet regulations that require sheetmetal panels resembling mass production vehicles (Nascar), car prototypes and aircraft skin components. English wheel production is at its highest volumes, in low volume sports car production, particularly when more easily formed aluminium is used. Where high volume production runs of panels are required the wheel is replaced by a stamping press, that has a much higher capital set up cost and longer development time than an English Wheel, but each panel in the production run can be produced in a matter of seconds. This cost is defrayed across a larger production run, but a stamping press is limited to only one model of panel per set of dies. The English wheel model shown is manually operated, but when used on thicker sheet metals such as for ship hulls the machine may be powered and be much larger than the one shown here.
Read more about English Wheel: Construction, Operation
Famous quotes containing the words english and/or wheel:
““Mustn’t grumble” was the most English of expressions. English patience was mingled inertia and despair. What was the use? But Americans did nothing but grumble! Americans also boasted. “I do some pretty incredible things” was not an English expression. “I’m fairly keen” was not American. Americans were showoffs—it was part of our innocence—we often fell on our faces; the English seldom showed off, so they seldom looked like fools.”
—Paul Theroux (b. 1941)
“It might become a wheel spoked red and white
In alternate stripes converging at a point
Of flame on the line, with a second wheel below,
Just rising, accompanying, arranged to cross,
Through weltering illuminations, humps
Of billows, downward, toward the drift-fire shore.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)