[KwartzLab] Making a spoked, wooden wheel

[Kevin Martin]

That is one of the main points of the wheel, to provide inertia. It has to be able to carry through the 2/3 - ¾ of a turn where the pedal cannot provide useful motive force, without too much loss in speed. If you put a crank on it you can have two pedals 180 degrees apart which shortens the undriven portions of the rotation so less inertia is required.

The drawback of a solid wheel is that it has a lot of mass that does not add to rotational inertia, namely all the mass near the hub. All this does it make the whole thing heavier to pick up and move.

You could use a disk of thin plywood, and build up a rim on either face by gluing on segments of wood, but this would be harder to balance since there would not be good control of the radius of the inner edge of the rim pieces.

Ideally, the wheel should be balanced, but "being balanced" is not an absolute, so the real question would be whether a wheel  would be balanced enough as built without requiring some adjustments.
-Kevin

From: discuss-bounces at kwartzlab.ca [mailto:discuss-bounces at kwartzlab.ca] On Behalf Of Chris Bruner

A couple of things that come to mind.
1. The spinning wheel has inertia, so a solid plywood spinning wheel will have more. Could this be a problem?
2. Does the spinning wheel need to be balanced?

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