the rims you saw were on american chopper I presume. I saw the black widow show and was surprised to see how they made the frames.

My estimation is that they turn on a large lathe or VTL a wheel blank with all the tire specific requirements (all the controus etc have standards which need to be met so the tire will seal to the rim). I suspect that those are pruchasd as I am sure they would have shown how the blanks were turned.

The blank may have been clamped into a manual indexing fixture. Basically it is a fixture which allows the blank to be manually indexed using pins. I suspect this was how they did it as I watched the guy run one onf the spokes complete before going on. Now that might have been done for TV to show how the pattern would look or maybe to see if the pattern was correct, but I suspect it was due to fixtureing. The ideal way would be to get a large machine with sufficient travel and run all the passes for each tool complete before tool changing as this would be the quickest.