Forum > Paddlewheels/Drive Systems

Constructing a paddlewheel?

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Eddy Matthews:
Hi Guys,

I've decided my next project will be a sternwheel towboat called the "Suter" - A photo is attached.

No problem with the basic boat, but this will be the first model where I need to make a paddlewheel - So can anyone give any tips on how to go about it? Are there any pitfalls I should avoid? Basically ANY help would be appreciated! :-)

Regards
Eddy

mjt60a:
This is one for Towboat Joe, I'd say  :D

towboatjoe:
For beauty there's nothing like making everything seperately and then glueing it all together. It's time consuming to build wheels, especiall when you need several exactly the same. It's best to use a good tight grained wood for strength when making the arms and carving out a flange.

I build a lot of models and always looking for shortcuts to speed up the building process. When I did the Lady Lois I made one form of a wheel with the flange, arms, iron circle, and blocking. Then I made a mold of it and poured five resin copies. For realism you can glue pin heads on the arms at the flange and iron circle to look like bolts.

Eddy Matthews:
Thanks for that Joe.... Do you, or anyone else reading this, happen to have any photos of a wheel taken during construction? You know the old saying, a picture is worth a thousand words!

I like the idea of making one wheel frame and using that as a pattern to resin cast the five frames that I need - sounds like a great idea to save time AND get 5 frames that are identical!

Regards
Eddy

Khephre:
Joe,

I was very interested to read that you'd cast a set of wheels - flanges, arms, etc. - in resin. My immediate reaction was to worry about whether the resulting castings might be too brittle for the intended purpose.

Did you reinforce the castings at all? Make the arms over scale thickness? Or does the final assembly process strengthen everything up?

Many tks
Tony
Akl, NZ

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