Wheel designing, hints and tips for before making that attempt.

[seekingknowledge]

Hi all , since ive been doing a few drawings of a few ideas that i have for a wheel which will be made out of wood and will use rolling weights i thought i would start a thread to gather the dos and dont's and tools to be used when it comes to basic woodworking.

Firstly i have a couple of drawings but i should really re draw them to scale, sounds easy enough but when it comes to marking out lines on the actual wooden wheel (where the weights will slide) what are some basic techniques,steps and things to remember in order to get each (eight) position exactly the same distance from the axis and from the outer rim and be evenly spaced apart from each other.

I intend to use a wooden axle maybe an inch in diameter, what is a method of joining two wheels (each maybe a meter or less in diameter and about half an inch thick) together that are about a foot or less apart using the axle.

Is possible i will use two extra wheels in between the two outer wheels to help support the rolling (cylinder) weights.

But anyway regardless of my idea ( because it may not work anyway) i started this thread so that people could kick around there basic woodworking methods when it comes to building there wheels.

Cheers. 

[Steven Dufresne]

Hi seekingknowledge,
The wheel in the attached photo is plastic but the boss, the part for attaching the wheel to the shaft (for the Hyde generator I'm building), is wood and mostly homemade. On the right you can see the chunk of hardwood I cut them from. The procedure was to first drill a 5/8" hole and then to use my dremel to carve out the shape for the boss. To cut the boss out of the chunk of hardwood I used my table scroll saw, but a jig saw will do too. Lastly, I carefully marked and drilled the three holes for attaching the boss to the wheel.

The critical part was getting the hole to be at 90 degrees to the surface of the wood. I first tried drilling the hole using my common cheap drill press, available at most hardware stores for home use. However, the hole turned out not to be close enough to 90 degrees. If I put any bit in the chuck such that the tip is close to a mark on a piece of wood and I rotate the chuck by hand, I can see that the location of the tip of the bit with respect to the mark varies. I checked this with other people's similar cheap drill presses and found similar inaccuracy. So my first bosses made this way were no good. I then took the chunk of wood to a machine shop and had them drill some holes for me on their drill presses, telling them that I needed the holes to be as close to 90 degrees as possible. They did it for $20CDN. They both drilled and reamed four holes for me and I picked the best two. I didn't notice any difference that their reaming made between the holes I drilled and their drilled and reamed holes, so with wood, the reaming may not be necessary. The 90 degree result was much better. Now I just need to work on the wobble.

I also gave the machine shop a part of my shaft so they could make sure it would have a snug fit.

My biggest problem in building experiments that involve wheels is attaching the wheel/disk to the shaft such that a) it works, and b) the wheel/disk is at 90 degrees and doesn't wobble. Doing this with cheap tools at home isn't easy.
-Steve
http://rimstar.org   http://wsminfo.org
PS. The boss in the photo that's not attached to the wheel has a grey base because it's painted with nickel paint. Ignore that.