Broken Transom Wheels - Excel - Customer Service

[Fenlander]

Forgetting the interesting thoughts of how to overcome this failure is it just me that is thinking return for full refund or keep and claim a massive part refund to offset the beefing up needed?

Assuming these are the 350 type at £149 they are a huge proportion of strongly made transom wheels around £180-£200 that won't break.

[Oldman2]

Well yes ideally thats what should happen but didnt the op accept a swop of type to start with, then a replacement for the broken one also perhaps he is not keen on having all those holes in his transom unused/filled and new ones drilled for more wheel sets. Maybe a part refund is a possibility

[Steve509926]

Originally Posted by Oldman2

Can I suggest you whittle some hardwood down to the internal size of your legs, knock out the plastic plug from the axle end and tap in your timber strengthener until flush. Then drill through for a replacement axle

Like that idea, and if needs be that is what I shall do.

Originally Posted by TmMorris

Chances are you just got a leg with a bad weld and you'll never have the issue again

That's what I'm hoping for with the replacement

Originally Posted by TmMorris

If they are the same as my wheels then the end of the leg is closed as if a washer has been welded to the end of the tube to seal it, otherwise I would think that would be the best solution

They must be different legs Tim, mine are the 350 wheels

Originally Posted by Fenlander

Forgetting the interesting thoughts of how to overcome this failure is it just me that is thinking return for full refund

Should the replacement leg fail, that is exactly what I shall be doing

Originally Posted by Oldman2

Well yes ideally thats what should happen but didnt the op accept a swop of type to start with, then a replacement for the broken one also perhaps he is not keen on having all those holes in his transom unused/filled and new ones drilled for more wheel sets.

Bit spooky being spoken about as if I'm not here
but holes in the transom don't really concern me too much.


I shall firstly try the replacement and hopefully the leg that broke was just a rouge as Jeff and Tim have suggested. However if it fails again, options will be a full refund or beef them up with a partial refund.
In the mean time, I will adapt the broken leg so at least I will have a spare

[TmMorris]

Ok. I built a grass kart when I was about 15 and it's on the wall of the workshop so I went to remind myself how I'd made the stub axles. While I was looking at it I noticed the brand new, heavier duty track rods I'd fitted last summer (I appear to be a bit heavier at 48 than 15 so beefed up a few bits to compensate). That's when I remembered the old 12mm aluminium track rods were somewhere on a work bench.

One of those serendipitous moments then occurred because they fit inside the stub axle tubes of the boat wheels perfectly.

The other key element that I also noticed was that my wheels are actually different to the ones I had previously looked at in that the stub axle did in fact pass all the way through the leg. I also noticed they were already beginning to rust after one weekend of use.





The old kart track rod. Conveniently threaded to take an M8 and conveniently the right diameter to fit snugly into the axle tube.

Drilled out the hole for the split pin. I could have just cut the rod to be short of the pin hole but thought it might serve as an additional fixing point to hold everything in place. Made the holes slightly over size to avoid any alignment issues when pulling up the bolt.



Once in place and tested I cut the bar flush to the stub.

I did clean the tubes thoroughly as well as giving the weld points a little bit of phosphoric acid to kill the tiny bit of rust showing and pushed some sikaflex down the axle before the final fit of the tube, as well as smearing some around the bolt head just to inhibit the salt water.





I did contemplate using an elongated washer under the bolt head to further spread load around the lower leg but ultimately felt that just putting the rod through was going to minimise the risk of shearing or bending under a twisting load.

I also think that a 12mm by 100mm stainless bolt just covered in sikaflex and pushed through snugly, would be a one minute job and achieve the same end result of compensating for the thin walls and possibly flawed welds and the embrittlement of the chroming process.

[Fenlander]

Excellent job... always great to reach for some saved item/offcut that saves the day without expenditure, delay or travel.

[TmMorris]

Yup. Amount of junk kept is proportional to number of quick and cheap jobs that can be carried out.

My garage was burgled once in London and the real blow was that they took my box of lifetime collected weird small bits of junk. The number of times since I've needed something that I recall being in that box is infuriating. It had taken over twenty years to collect all those bits!

[Steve509926]

Good job that Tim, looks like it strengthens them just where needed. I shall do something similar to mine when I get the replacement.

Your legs are different, yours are tubular and mine are square box section. Are yours the 250 wheels? Also the tube wall on your stub axle looks much thicker.

Similar story on having something taken. My truck was broken into last year, and yes it was annoying to have all the costly Milwaukee tools taken, but what really pissed me off was them taking my toolbag with all the special tools I'd fashioned and collected over the past 30 years. The 90° bent screw drivers, the extended allen keys the 70 year old upholstery hammer that was my dads - scumbags!

[TmMorris]

Hi Steve. It's weird how the worthless things are the most valuable.

Yes, mine are the 250 ones. I hadn't appreciated that the 350 wheels used a completely different leg and axle design. The larger wheels with their larger contact area probably need to be on stronger metalwork than the smaller wheels.

But I would think yours are easy to fix by drilling through the other side of the leg, putting a bolt with a big washer through then putting the broken stub axle on and brazing it back on rather than welding. I think that would make for a much stronger solution as from what I can see your set up appears to be very heavily reliant on a single weld of very thin metal and asking it to take a lot of load and then possible twist which from the picture you posted does look an impossible ask?

[Steve509926]

I don't think I will bother fixing the broken one, I'll strengthen the 2 good ones with your easy/cheap solution when the replacement arrives.
Thanks for that Tim.

[Tonus]

Steve how are you getting on with the replacement leg from Excel?



If you remember I bought the same 350mm wheel set as you - I've since been taking my outboard off every time I'm finished with the boat - just in case the weight might put too much pressure on these thin-walled legs! I'm sure I'm being over cautious...


When I bring the boat through to the garden I'm not bumping up and down the patio any more either... think this may have been the cause of the last set of wheel brackets bending...

[Steve509926]

Hi Tonus,

So far so good. I've only used them twice, both times with the outboard on and fully loaded, admittedly on decent slipways but from truck to water probably 100 mtrs both times.

I beefed up the stub axle, very similar to the way Tim did. M16 setscrew through the stub axle set in Polymer Resin (Toolstation /Screwfix) with a nylock nut to tighten it all up. I could probably take the nut off and shorten the setscrew now that the resin has set rock solid which would make it look neater.
I'm very confident that the stub axle won't snap at the weld again, but I think the legs and brackets are so thin that any lateral pressure on them will probably bend them somewhere. For that reason I will not be putting the OB on the transom unless the ground/slipway is in decent condition or if it's over gravel/sand. I'll use the OB trolley to take the OB down to the waters edge and/or back to the truck.

[paddlers]

I never had an issue with the Trem wheels failing they were just so floaty so I welded some 4" stainless 1" tube handles on them.

[Tonus]

Great stuff Steve - looks like you've given yourself a better chance of them lasting!


I kind of wish I'd gone for the Trem ones that go a little under the transom and have the slotted locking 'pins' (see below). I wanted them quickly so got them next-day from Excel instead of waiting days to get them from Italy and paying the import taxes etc.



I'll let you know how my wheels/legs get on - been out twice with both trips rolling the boat 500m to the slip - so far so good!

[Steve509926]

Hindsite is a wonderful thing

I wish I had read the posts Fenlander had done about transom wheels before I purchased the complete package from Excel. But we live and learn, and the information is stored for when/if I change MY SIB.