Arrive 8:30am
When I arrived on site this morning, Richard was already squirrelling away with one side of the wheel. As you can see he is applying cladding to join the CNC cut pieces together.
The thing is, Richard didn't cut the pieces from the rather beautiful CNC ready drawing I emailed him, so he drew one up from memory. Richard says he was very tired when he did this and as you can tell because when the four pieces are together, the lines do not meet up. What has actually happened is the radius is 1000mm on one side, and 900mm on the other, so the wheel is not an equal diametre all the way round. Also, the diagonal lines that need to meet up are not central to the pivot point so they shall never meet up. Not in a month of Sundays.
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| The CNC cut pieces of MDF that dont quite work... |
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| But Richard was already putting them together before I pointed this out to him... |
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| He didn't quite understand why it wouldn't work. |
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| Luckily my maths skills are quite good so I had to explain. I dont think he was too happy... |
So I came up with a rather wonderful idea (if I say so myself), that we should remove the diagonal struts that don't match up. Richard told me I was a genius (I may be paraphrasing here...) so we got the panel saw out and promptly removed them.
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| If it doesn't work... saw it off. |
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| Putting the steel tube in for the irregular wheel to pivot around. |
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| Attaching the joiners to one side so we can simply put the other pieces on top. |
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| Coming together nicely |
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| Lovely. |
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| The discs to support the pole and cover the messy joins. |
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| Cladding the interior with 4mm ply (reclaimed) |
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| Putting some more timber for the cladding panels to sit against. |
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| Inside the wheel hammering them in. |
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| Oooh. |
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| The workbench then got in the way... |
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| So we had the better idea of putting it on the floor. |
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| Made the whole process a lot easier. |
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| All clad! |
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| Putting the wheel into context. |
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| We added some non-structural diagonal supports... |
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| Then realised it was going to be much easier to do it on the ground. |
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| Looks like the model! |
Once we had put the diagonal pieces back on, we decided it would be much easier to do the cladding once the wheel was together as we could spin the wheel round as we went. We decided to make the base for the wheel. We discussed our method of attack, and we could make it roughly look like the model, but we had to change it a lot to make it able to take the weight of the wheel. We decided to make it out of 3 x 3 then clad it nicely to look like the model. Richard then showed me how to do a housing joint!
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| Housing joint. |
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| The housing joint I did. |
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| Putting the base together |
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| another housing joint? |
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| Richard |
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| I put some decorative cladding on the wheel support. |
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| Richard did some more housing joints |
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| It's nice and strong. Housing joints are structurally very sound. |
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| This cladding is decorative, but will also improve the structure. |
The next job was to drill a hole big enough to fit the steel rod through that will hold the wheel in place whilst allowing it to rotate. To do this Richard got a special drill bit, and a really big drill and it took him a fair while to do this. I had to support the structure with an opposite force and I ended up with sawdust all over me.
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| Checking the steel pipe fits |
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| After fitting the wheel into the supports |
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| It spins! |
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| Reinforcing |
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| More reinforcements |
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| After cladding the outside |
So we ended the day with the wheel mounted in it's base, the exterior clad in bits of 6 x 1 and the structure fully stable and able to take the weight of the wheel. A very productive day, albeit very frustrating. It's a shame that the CNC cut pieces that made up the frame of the wheel weren't correct, but you have to take into account that Richard is very busy. It's getting very tiring now, especially as it is just me and Richard doing all the building. Very nearly there though, last few jobs to do!
