Dayton Wheels and Fruehauf Trailer wheel components

Dayton Wheels & Early Fruehauf wheel
​component suppliers
​By Darlene Norman

While researching wheels that were used on early Fruehauf trailers, my co-author, Darlene Norman chronicled this history. It may be useful to anyone with a trailer pre-WWII. It's pretty interesting...

George Walther (1876-1955) and his brother started their steel foundry in 1905. George felt that the blooming automobile industry was a good direction to point their energies, so they began casting automobile parts for passenger cars. Around 1910 he heard about a new vehicle, trucks. He noticed the wooden wheels not only on automobiles, but also on the first trucks. George heard that the White Motor Co. wanted cast steel wheels and were ordering them from Belgium. He looked at some of those wheels and, based on his knowledge as an engineer, knew that the Belgian wheels would easily break.

The Belgian wheels were 6 or 8 spoked, so George designed his with an uneven number of spokes that could better withstand the stress of carrying heavy loads, etc. His wheels had 5 or 7 spokes. White Motor Co. was the first to use George’s newly patented cast steel wheel for solid rubber tires on December 13, 1913.

When WWI broke out in 1914, the government said they needed better truck wheels. By 1916 George had developed a cast steel, hollow spoke wheel for solid rubber tires. George’s 7 spoke wheel became the standard for the Army’s Class B quartermaster Liberty Trucks, and government four-wheel trailers. The 5 spoke wheel was used on Class A Army trucks.

Companies that stayed with the steel wheels after WWI included Fruehauf Trailer. We found in earlier research, that Fruehauf produced trucks as well as trailers during WWI. By Jan. 1925 the Dayton Steel Foundry had developed a steel wheel for pneumatic tires, as the solid rubber couldn’t withstand the stress of the increasing mileage required of them.

The cast steel wheel for solid rubber tires lasted for about 10 years. In the 1920s the pneumatic tires replaced the solid rubber.

So, I went looking for Dayton’s patents, specifically wheel patents (they also made lots of car parts). George’s first wheel patent was USD45097S, filed April 18, 1913. Here’s a link to that patent, as well as a drawing that, to my untrained eye, looks exactly like Glen’s trailer wheel. Since George had the patent, no one should have been making any that looked that similar that early in wheel history.
https://www.google.com/patents/USD45097

In 1916 George had developed the 5 and 7 spoke wheels (hollow cast) that were used by the Army. We know that by 1925 Dayton was no longer producing wheels for solid rubber tires.
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George’s 2nd wheel patent US1346864 filed May 19, 1919, was his first 5 spoke wheel. They were using this in the Army in 1916, 3 years earlier, so he probably took a while to get around to filing the patent. The 5 spoke, and 7 spoke models, were hollow cast. That would mean that earlier 6 spoke model was solid steel, while the 1919 5 and 7 spoke models were hollow. If wheels are solid steel, we know they were made prior to 1916.
https://www.google.com/patents/US1346864