Early Segmented Style: About the time the original factory prepared 100S race cars were being prepared. Donald Healey asked Gerry Coker to design a couple of steering wheels. Mr. Healey, known to have a frugal side to him, thought they might save some money by making their own wood rimmed steering wheels. Roger Menadue and an assistant were given the job of producing the metal frames and applying the wood. Mr. Coker went about the design of two 16" wheels, one with drilled spokes, one slotted. They were both to be covered by six separate solid wood pieces per side. The wood would be secured by a total of 24 rivets. The drilled spoke wheels were to become standard on the 100S production cars. Some relatively small number of these drilled spoke wheels were made in the shop before Menadue tired of the work and the wood rims were outsourced to Coventry Timber Bending, a producer of wood rims for Jaguar and others. At that time the rim style also changed, making these solid wood segmented wheels quite rare.

Later Bent Spiral: These rims were made by Coventry Timber Bending; the spokes were the same units as earlier. This rim construction is bent spiral (or barrel wound) with six rivets. The wood was beech, a very fine grained, light colored wood when new. The rims aged to a honey golden or light brown color. These steering wheels were fitted to the vast majority of production 100S cars.

These steering wheels are rare today as are the cars they were fitted to.



Follow the story by visiting my blogs for the later 100S, Le Mans, and 100M steering wheels.