Disc wheel

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The four disc wheels from Glum

Disc wheels are the oldest form of wheel that was first used on vehicles. They consist of a closed wheel disc which is provided with a running surface and an axle mount. Compared to a spoked wheel , a full wheel made of the same material is less elastic and can absorb impacts less well.

application

Land vehicles

Disc wheel made of wood, Stare Gmajne, Laibacher Moor , (Slovenia)

Disc wheels have been assembled from several boards since the late Neolithic period . Specimens from this period have mostly only survived in lakes and moors in the absence of air. The end-Neolithic disc wheels from Gnarrenburg were found in the lowest layers of the Teufelsmoor . Glum's four disc wheels date from the early Bronze Age . The wheel of Stare gmajne from the Baden culture comes from the Ljubljana Moor in Slovenia .

According to Winfried Reinhardt , the full wheel was used in Europe from around 2000 BC. It was displaced by the spoked wheel , which compared to the full wheel, has the advantage of having wider treads, in addition to greater elasticity, without increasing the volume and weight of the wheel.

In West Africa, wooden disc wheels were still used for heavy vehicles such as cannons in the 19th century . Gustav Nachtigall was able to observe these in 1870 in Kukawa , the capital of Borno . The companions were pulled by two "melancholy" mules. In Anatolia , wagons with wooden disc wheels were in use until the 1980s.

railroad

Wheelsets for freight wagons with solid wheels

In contrast to road vehicles, the spoked wheel was the norm in the beginning with the railroad. The introduction of disc or solid wheels only began after the Second World War for passenger coaches and for locomotives from the 1990s. The necessary elasticity of solid wheels for railway operations is achieved by an S-shaped or corrugated shape of the wheel disc. Today most bikes are made from one piece without tires . A different heat treatment of the wheel body and the running surface enables the formation of an elastic wheel disc with a hard, wear-resistant running surface.

Cycles

Racing bike with disc wheel

literature

  • Stuart Piggott, The earliest wheeled transport from the Atlantic Coast to the Caspian Sea. London: Thames and Hudson, 1983.
  • Fritz Winkler, Siegfried Rauch: Bicycle technology repair, construction, production. 10th edition, BVA Bielefelder Verlagsanstalt GmbH & Co. KG, Bielefeld, 1999, ISBN 3-87073-131-1

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Winfried Reinhardt: History of Public Transport from the Beginnings to 2014: Mobility in Germany by rail, subway, tram and bus . Springer-Verlag, 2014, ISBN 978-3-658-06628-4 , pp. 23 ( Google Book [accessed April 17, 2016]).
  2. ^ Robin Law, Wheeled Transport in Pre-Colonial West Africa. Journal of the International African Institute 50/3 (1980), 256. JSTOR 1159117 , accessed 8/02/2016
  3. ↑ Gustav Nachtigal, Sahara and Sudan, translated by AGB Fisher & HJ Fisher, vol. II. London, Hurst 1979, 124, 282-283