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The Wheel is finished
To achieve a completed wheel I needed to cut out two sets of disks and two sets of 28 floaters. The reason for all this cutting was using cardboard and paper that were too thin. Everything got a coat of varnish, two coats of primer, and at least three coats of paint. The white rings on the wheels were drawn on by hand with a gel pen. The axle is a bamboo skewer wrapped with white paper to get the required thickness, and the white center disks are just paper.
This wheel has its problems, but I learned a lot. When doing things like floaters, the horizontal pieces that move the water, if you need 28, start with 40. Through one accident or another I lost a bunch and only finished with 1 extra floater. Also, I made the floaters something like 10 mm too long. This allowed me a bit on the end to hold on too while I was painting, and it allowed me to cut them as needed to get the correct overhang outside the wheel.
The wheel disks are 1 mm after painting, but they are still a long way from rigid. A big problem when assembling the wheel was how to keep the disks parallel. If I build another wheel, I'll have to work on that problem some more. I figured out how to keep the disks from getting too close to each other, but not how to keep them from being too far apart. A further problem is that the disks were cut out by hand. Laser cutting would go a long way towards making things symmetrical and therefore easier to align. The saving grace of the axle is that I didn't put glue on all the paper when I wrapped it. I only glued the last half inch or so. This allowed the disks to move by tightening, or loosening, the wrap as needed.
It's not perfect....not even close. But, by the standard I use, how does it look at arms length, I'm pretty proud of what I've done.
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