A mill with 20" Y travel would handle the milling on a 21" wheel. You'd never be in a situation where the diameter of any decorative milling would be greater than 19" or so.
Are you looking to make motorcycle wheels or car wheels?
If car wheels, the cost of a mill is only a small part of the overall cost. Billet aluminum car wheels have a center that is machined from solid and then welded to a roll formed rim. A piece of aluminum round stock large enough to allow machining a complete wheel from the solid would typically cost more than a finished wheel sells for. Lots of misperceptions out there though that they're machined from solid rounds.
Anyway, to make the car wheels you'd need milling, turning, and rim rolling equipment at a minimum.
Motorcycle wheels are can be made cheaper and yet they sell for more than car wheels. You can buy rotary forged wheel blanks completely turned and polished for $200 apiece or so. All you then have to do is machine whatever design you want into the wheel disc and make a hub assembly for the wheel.
My own opinion, based on a reasonable amount of knowledge of what's required to make either wheel, is that you can find all sorts of car parts or motorcycle parts to machine that will generate much greater profit than billet wheels.
For example, a wheel that retails for $ will gross about $600 max for the manufacturer. Out of that $600, you'd spend say $200 for the forged and machined blank plus $75 or so in material and parts for the hub if you made it in house too. That leaves $325 for all the labor, overhead, tooling, assembly, packaging, hub polishing, and profit. The mix of diameters, center designs, wheel widths and hub widths reduces productivity since you're not actually making production runs but rather piece parts (unless you have lots of money available to tie up in inventory). I don't see much profit left out of that $325 myself.
There are endless numbers of smaller parts that can be produced for cars or bikes where there's far less competition than in the custom wheel market, for far greater profit margins. A particular part might have $5 in material and a few minutes worth of time to sell for a price that allows for lots of sales. You can make legitimate production runs because you don't have to tie up lots of money to make a hundred pieces. Each part is the same, as opposed to the mix of sizes in wheels, further enhancing productivity. Polishing of small parts can be mechanized without spending a lot of money.
Using motorcycle parts as an example, for each person who will spend $ on a pair of billet wheels, there's probably 500 who will spend $40 for some dress-up part for the same bike. Its a whole lot easier to make some money off $20,000 in sales than to make it waiting for those rare customers who'll spend $ on a pair of wheels.
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