[KwartzLab] Making a spoked, wooden wheel

[Kevin Martin]

I think a chisel would dig in too much. You might be able to do it by holding a rasp to the edge of the wheel while treadling it, but even that would be iffy.
The best bet would be Jeff's idea of using a router to cut the groove. You don't need a custom guide; the guide fence that comes with most routers would be sufficient. This would likely be a two-person job: One to hold the router against the rim of the wheel (and the guide fence tight against the side of the rim), and the other person to slowly turn the wheel to feed the router. This would be very awkward for a production environment, but would work fine for a one-off. You could also do it by yourself using a router table.

Any idea what groove profile to use? I suspect a V-groove would work best (and the drawing you linked to shows two V-grooves), so you would want a V-cutting bit for the router.

As for the bearing it looks like they have none, just a metal shaft passing through holes in the wood frame. It might be advantageous to have plastic (HDPE, or better yet Teflon or Delrin) bushings in the frame, but they can be added as a later improvement.

You don't need that cute curve in the eccentric (the crank for the pedal). I would just take a longer shaft and (heating with a torch) bend it into the requisite crank shape. They only seem to have a single crank for a single pedal; if you want two pedals the crank is a slightly more complex shape.
-Kevin


From: discuss-bounces at kwartzlab.ca [mailto:discuss-bounces at kwartzlab.ca] On Behalf Of Punkin3.14

Regarding bearings. I'm not that far along in my planning yet, however I'm using the following plan as a reference for the mechanics (though not the frame design):

http://www.craftsmanspace.com/free-projects/spinning-wheel-plan.html

If I were to cut the belt groove out of a solid wheel, I presume that would be done with a chisel while the wheel was spinning, or is there another technique?
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