At Hamilton, we’ve said it before and we’ll keep saying it: we love to custom-design solutions for our customers. If you can dream it, we’ve got the in-house firepower to build it.
Take our latest pièce de résistance: a giant 18"× 6" wheel made from our signature high performance nylon (aka our Nylast® wheels). We customized it with a metal hub to function as a drive wheel. So when the motor says go, this wheel doesn’t ask questions.
Rated for a 20,000-pound payload, it features a 2½-inch steel sleeve milled right into its core, complete with a keyway for the shaft. The metal hub is mission critical for a nylon wheel. Why? Because nylon—no matter how tough—can’t stand up to a steel shaft grinding away at it all day. So we machined out the core, installed a high-tensile steel sleeve, bolted it in tight, and gave that keyed shaft something solid to grip. Drive, baby, drive.
Why go nylon in the first place? While the application itself is hush-hush, suffice it to say that Nylast® thrives in environments where rust, corrosion or flying sparks are a no-go—like food processing, sanitation or chemical-heavy settings (side note: check out our complete chemical resistance wheel guide). And with a tensile strength of 11,000 psi, it’s got the muscle to handle serious abuse with better impact strength and resilience.
But here’s the kicker: this monster wheel only weighs about 20 pounds! A steel version of the same wheel? Try more than 100 pounds. So yeah—lightweight, high capacity and seriously engineered.
And if you’re wondering about options, we’ve got range. We can produce Nylast® wheels from as small as 3 inches in diameter to a towering 28 inches. Widths? We go as wide as 6 inches. Whatever your size requirements, we can build to match.
All this magic is possible because Hamilton has invested big in our in-house machining game. We built this wheel on one of our vertical lathes, and now we’re adding two more to keep up with demand and push our capabilities even further.
The bottom line: if you’ve got a challenge, we’ve got the tech—and the tenacity—to build your perfect wheel.