Any help on rubber tread repair?
I've used black silicone caulking to good success. On narrow cracks you can just smooth it out with a wetted finger and use a tooth pick to make new tread lines. On wider cracks it might get a bit more involved. The caulking will shrink as it dries so you might want to apply a bit more than what you think looks right. Don't try to get it shaped just perfect because the shrinking will alter your work anyway. My feeling is that excess caulking is more desirable than having it shrink away and leave an indented area. After it has dried you can use a razor blade to carefully slice or shave away the excess and to cut tread lines.
I had one rubber tread that was actually cracked all the way through and the tread therefor came completely off the metal wheel. To repair this I used a round wooden toothpick to make two tiny 'splints' about 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch in length each. I then drilled two holes side by side and about a half inch apart in each face of the broken tread - four holes total. The holes of one side should be lined up with the holes on the facing side. The depth of the holes must be at least half the length of the wooden splint. ['Splint' doesn't quite seem to be the correct word. Maybe 'pin'?] The holes should be slightly smaller in diameter than the toothpick pins. The pins were then inserted into the two holes on one side and then the rubber tread wrapped back onto the metal wheel. At this point you could probably ad a bit of glue of some sort to the pins and then slip the exposed ends of the two pins into the corresponding holes in the opposite end of the tread. Because the old rubber tread is cracked and shrunk it's likely that the two ends will no longer fit tightly together but hopefully you've got only a fairly narrow space that you can now fill with black silicone. This is hard to describe with words alone. Photos would make it easier to follow, of course, but I don't have any.
If anyone has any of these old metal wheels with broken apart treads and you don't really care to try repairing them as I've (poorly) described, please consider selling them to me. I'll be tackling a project this spring or summer that will require four such wheels. :-)
EDIT: If the crack you are attempting to repair is fairly large, then it may take quite some time for the silicon to dry all the way through. It may appear to be dry on the outside but still soft inside and you might mess it up if you start to 'sculpt' it too soon. In this instance it might work better to apply the silicone a little at a time in multiple sessions. Not certain about this however.
Topic: Restore question (Read 4408 times)
