Making Stub Axle Spacers

[Timothy Field]

For those of you who want to make your own Stub axle spacers and cannot buy the correct size and you haven’t got a lathe then this is how I’ve managed to make some out of raw material using an economical but quick and effective process. The time it takes me is about 20 minutes per spacer maximum.

My stub axles on the Zip shadow are 15mm and I couldn’t find any spacers I could buy to fit. So I decided to make my own the raw material I chose was Aluminium seamless tube grade 6082 T6 this is a tempered material and artificially age hardened so remains stable with age but also has a good strength but at the same time can be machined.

For spaces to fit 15mm stubs I picked an Outer Diameter of 7/8 of an inch and 10sgw wall thickness (approx 3.25mm)

I’ve used a heavy duty pipe cutter I bought from Machine mart (Product CHT242 current price £8.39). When cutting the material this tool works extremely accurately and has a de-burring tool which comes in very handy.

It took no more than a minute to work through the metal and cut the material leaving a very straight edge. Some splaying does occur and burring but this is easily dealt with as you will later see. Here are some pictures 1-3 below are of the cutting stage.

I then cleaned up the inner edges using the de-burring tool on the pipe cutter and also cleaned up and flattened the faces on a sanding stone as the pipe cutter puts a slight chamfer on the face, steps as shown pictures 4-5.

I then removed the splay on the one side of the outer diameter and put a little bit of a chamfer on this is so this is no interference with the bearing case as the spacer is slightly larger than the outer diameter of the bearing journal. This I do by just holding the spacer between my thumb and forefinger and running a file at an angle round it.

Picture 6 is the finished product although looking at the picture it could do with a polish and clean.

The final picture shows one sat on the stub axle note the chamfer next to the bearing.

[Timothy Field]

Just thought I'd add this to show some finished examples made using the above method.

[reggio]

Hi Tim
very neat indeed and much better looking ( and lighter ) than the ones i made in desperation from Stainless steel tube ! I had to clean them up with wet and dry and elbow grease !!!

[Timothy Field]

Hi Reg
Good to hear from you and thank you for your interest and kind comments.