Sunday, 10th of September
Stefan and Sam (with the help of his dad), began to design, cut, sand and loosely put together the water wheel.
The day:
In the morning, Sam's dad helped us to cut the harder parts of the water wheel. After a quick search, Stefan found out the paddles should be small and on an angle to create small pockets for the water to catch in.
We first cut 2 big circles of plywood for the outside of the wheel and then 16 rectangular smaller pieces for the middle and paddles. Then came the refinements. Sam sanded most of the plywood, evening out the pieces so they were of the same size.
A week earlier, Stefan had made a prototype to hold the smart drive generator together out of MDF wood. This sucks in rain so Sam cut a new one and we re-did it out of ply. The results were great!
After the hard day of work, we were able to sit down and relax. We were now able to assemble the wheel loosely to see how it would work. Looks awesome so far. At the top of the small water fall, a flume will collect the water and a pipe will project the mass of water at the water wheel, enough to spin it at a decent speed. When we assemble, screw and glue the wheel, we will have to seal it to avoid any losses.
Order has now been placed for the charge controller, floodlights, bridge rectifiers, fuses and more! Estimated 2 weeks delivery time so we should be able to put our project completely together sometime around the holidays. And good news, Sam's family might have a spare battery we can use for our project.
So, after all this blubber you'd probably wan't to see some media, so here you go:
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| Smart drive motor first prototype |
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| Sketches |
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| Cutting circle disks - outer water wheel |
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| Replacing old MDF disk with plywood |
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| Plywood disk screwed in, and it's good! |
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| All the pieces after the long day |
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| Wow, this looks good! |
This is a really cool idea! It´s really innovative and I like how you´re replicating technology that´s been around for a while (as in a couple of centuries or so). If you really wanted to (if you haven´t done so already), you could look at applications of water wheels in the past or how they´re used in the 21st century. Keep up the good work guys!
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