VCCA Home Forums TECHNICAL - GENERAL Body - Sheet Metal, Paint & Wood Sticky Wheel Syndrome, A Common Occurrence?

I finished up a 10k brake checkup last night but with the pouring down rain I thought that I’d wait till morning to take her out for a test drive. The temps are well up in to the 90’s this morning and the humidity feels like we’re in southern Florida today, one of those bad hair days, you know. Well as soon as I climbed into the cab I knew it was gonna be a sticky one, by that I mean that my hands were literally sticking to the Steering Wheel.
The original paint has worn off about 76% of the wheel exposing the black composite. I know this condition is about as common as a McDonalds restaurant so I’m sure a lot of you have or have had the same experience. I got caught in the rain a few weeks and when I grabbed hold of the wheel with wet hands, the black comes off like wet paint.
My guess is that the composite probably contained some clay; this was in common use as filler in years past. As long as the paint held up it kept it from bleeding all over your hands.
And yes painting the wheel is somewhere on the bucket list.
Any one have similar encounters with there steering wheels and the “Black Death”??
Denny Graham
Sandwich, IL

Actually the wheels are hard rubber. The coating protected the wheel and gave it a shine. I have painted mine with good results. Used black lacquer and enamel. Both work well and hold up for a long time.

Yes Chip I know the wheel is hard rubber, as were the battery cases, many of the knobs especially shift knobs. But it was not a solid rubber material they have to form a compound to make it hard. It is the filler that they used that I was addressing.
In the early days clay was a common material used as filler, common also was sand, which can often be seen in old hard rubber that is badly deteriorated exposing the filler. But the majority of the volume was made up of a carbonaceous compound.

Here’s one of GM's later Patents for an improved hard rubber compound as used in battery cases. I’m sure that similar materials were used in the other hard rubber products before the plastic resins became the norm.
http://www.pbase.com/dennygraham/image/115881531/original
http://www.pbase.com/dennygraham/image/115881532/original
I apologize for the small size, but you should be able to read it with your magnifier.

It appears that petroleum coke was the major filler in the hard rubber compounds and that adding approximately 10% Portland cement to the formula resulted in a stronger material.
I’m still researching to find earlier patents for hard rubber compounds as might have been used in the steering wheels.

And as I noted, I will get the wheel painted when it comes up on the looooong list of things that I plan on doing. I’ve been using PPG paints for a while and will continue to use them on this truck. I plan to seal the wheel with DP-90 epoxy primer and for the finish I have PPG Omni 2k urethane paint that was matched to the original wheel and mast jacket.
I was mainly interested in whether other conservators had experienced the same thing in humid or rainy weather.
Denny Graham
Sandwich, IL

Yes, its normal for the unpainted areas to get sticky in humid weather.
It provides for a better grip.

I have had the problem on several old Chevys. When the original coating wears or oxidizes away then the black plague attacks. Gets on your hands and clothing if wet.

All righty guys, now I feel better, thought it might just be me and that someone in the last 60 years may have tried something new and different.
I've been reading all morning about rubber composition specificly hard rubber. It seems that normally soft rubber only uses about 5% sulfer to vulcanize but they use around 50% sulfer to get the hard rubber. I've been looking for any info I can find on Ebonite but it seems that the term has been modified by the Ebonite corporation to mean "bowling ball", which today doesn't even seem to have any "Ebonite" in it any more, it's all resin today. Back after the turn of the century Ebonite was one of the granddaddy’s of the plastics revolution and was used everywhere, the old black phones and in radios were one of the most common places you could find it.

I'd still like to find out what the exact composition was, that was used in the steering wheels in the pre-plastic era.

I had some fun last winter while working on the restoration of a few record players. The shock mounts and drive wheels are dried out in 99% of the old turntables. I did some experimenting with raw rubber to see if I could vulcanize my own replacement parts. Thinking that if this worked out there could be a cross over application for lots of rubber parts on the old cars & trucks. The reproduction parts often leave a lot to be desired and in many cases they are simply not available. I made a half dozen close tolerance molds from aluminum in the lathe. I used spring pressure to compress the material and used my “big ol’ wife’s” oven in the daytime when she was away as a heat source for the vulcanizing process. The raw material I used is a raw rubber sheet that the Bandag tire dealers use in retreading tires. It’s a lot of fun to take a glob of rubber stuffed into a mold and after baking it hold a finished rubber drive tire or shock grommet in your hand.
http://www.pbase.com/dennygraham/image/109800076/large
http://www.pbase.com/dennygraham/image/109680116/large
http://www.pbase.com/dennygraham/image/110862677/original

Now if I could only find a source for the hard rubber compound, or “Ebonite”!
DG

Ok, ok, one of the boys over at the Bolt got me off me duff and I got rid of that sticky old wheel today. Now I won’t be embarrassed to take it out in the rain for fear of getting’ me mitts all dirty.
The DP90LF epoxy primer coats:
http://www.pbase.com/dennygraham/image/116022012
The Omni AU, MTK finish coats:
http://www.pbase.com/dennygraham/image/116022024
Denny Graham
Sandwich, IL

I would imagine that it's not only rubber that is coming off of that wheel. Just think of all of the dirty manure farmers, and the sewer workers, and coal miners that may have owned it... Doubt they warshed their hands.... I can get surgical gloves at cost....

Maybe Howard Hughes wasn't nuts....

:vcca: Actually, the "bleeding" off of black gunk when wet was a precursor to the anti-drinking and driving movement. The early auto manufacturers would build this feature into their cheaper models so when you got in your car with a sweaty beer can or bottle, your hands would get all black and ostensibly, this was supposed to make further ingestion unappetizing. However, we all know this feature did not work because no matter how gunky our hands get, we will still drink our beer! Beamer