Axle material?

[rustedshut]

G,day everyone.
 Have a question regarding my front axle.
My 53 plunger frame was fitted with an 1968 a65 spitfire MK4 front wheel when I purchased it. When I first tried to remove the wheel I found it would not come off like it should, and had to remove the wheel, axle and sliders all at once as all were joined as one unit.
This was definitely no good.
I liked the look of the wheel and was what I had so wanted to use it.
 I acquired the correct fork sliders to suite the wheel and then replaced the original guts into the hub, then fitted sliders  to the tubes that are in the original triple tree for the frame.
Now came the fun bit,trying to find an axle to fit.
Tried six different ones till deciding there were no correct axles for my purpose out there.
So with what I could find around the shed I made another one to suit the purpose, But only had mild steel bar so used that.
I figured that It was not brittle so would be ok, the other axles I had tried seemed soft also, as I used one for template after grinding and filing to shape.
Question is will it do the job, or am I asking for trouble?
Thanks for any help Rusted.

[trickytree]

Wheel spindles are usually EN16t. Trouble is with using a bit of mild steel from the skip is that you have no idea what grade it is...its quite possibly EN1 which is a general purpose fabrication material and soft as cheese, not ideal but then neither is stainless steel and I have never ever come across a stainless wheel spindle that has broken.

Note that 2 spindles are available for that TLS brake...one for Triumph forks and one for BSA....neither fit properly on older fork sliders as the groove for the fork cap bolts are in the wrong place....depends what sliders you have, if you have later A65 then in theory the (longer) BSA spindle should fit no problems. I just cut a new grove in the spindle that came with the wheel and its not fell out yet.

Morel of the story (if you want one) is that BSA built these bikes up from what they had to hand at the time 50 odd years ago so I think its fine to do the same nowadays!

[bikerbob]

I had a similar problem when I restored my 1957 Flash I had the correct wheel with the ariel hubs but the forks were from an earlier model the ariel hub forks have a 1inch diameter spindle but the earlier forks had 7/8ths dia spindle I had a friend who turned me new spindle to fit out of mild steel plus distance pieces and I changed the bearings to suit and it has been on the bike now for 15 years with no problems.

[fido]

It should be fine for normal solo road use but you might want something stronger for higher stress applications like competition riding or a sidecar outfit.