(Eli5) Why do Buses & Trucks use 2 skinny wheels put together on each side of the axle? Instead of just using one fat wheel?
In: Engineering
In addition to all the other valid explanations, there’s a lot of “because that’s the way we’ve done it” resistance to change.
Back before radial tires, in order to have a tire be wider, it had to have a taller sidewall. To carry more load, you have to have a larger contact patch.
So in order to double the weight capacity of a wheel, you could either make the wheel twice as large, or just stack a second wheel next to it.
With radial tires, width is independent of height, so eventually somebody had the idea of “why don’t we just make the wheel twice as wide?”
They did that, worked out all the kinks, and ended up creating the “super single”.
After that, then they found that a super single isn’t as good in rain or snow as a dually.
But the initial reason for dually wheels was the limitations of bias ply tires.
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