Hi Chris, so you may be getting confused thinking about using sweep for the spokes - but instead of focusing on sweep you probably want to think about extruding the whole profile to make the shape instead.

Also with a wheel shape it can often be easier to start out with a full revolved solid shape and then boolean out some holes which will then leave the spokes as the left over material.

See this post for an illustration of this technique:
http://moi3d.com/forum/messages.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3349.2

Will that possibly work for what you need?

Also if you want to make a sunken down area instead of a hole that goes all the way through you can do that by making an extrusion that goes to a particular limited depth into the wheel shape and then using that extrusion as the cutting object in a boolean rather than using a curve as the cutting object, since using curves as the cutters makes the hole go all the way through.

- Michael