Peerless 1893 by Cathead - 1:87 - sternwheel Missouri River steamboat

[mtaylor]

Excellent solution, IMO, Eric.  I think they look great.

[kurtvd19]

The sign fix is nicely done.  Neat project.

Kurt

 

[Canute]

Good save on the signage.She's looking good. 👍

[Cathead]

Well, I quietly missed the one-year anniversary of this build, but I have made some progress by starting on the final "big" project, the paddle wheel. First I cut a whole stack of cherry lumber (same as that used for the main deck) on my Byrnes saw. This is more of the material I harvested here on-farm.

Then I laid out a pattern by estimating the size I wanted the wheel to be, from the one decent photo I have, and fiddling with different round objects until I found two diameters that were close enough. Once this was drawn, I set down tiny patches of double-sided tape on each leg's location and began laying out the wheel:

 

Each leg is hand-tapered to fit its neighbors using a sharp knife and sandpaper. I didn't worry about the exact outer length as I'll trim them all down later. I was most concerned with a consistent inner pattern and leaving a clean hole for an axle at the center. When I had them all dry-fit to my satisfaction, I removed each one, put a dab of wood glue on its inner surfaces, then re-assembled the wheel and let it dry.

 

Once this was solid I began hand-cutting the outer circle, formed from a series of small wedges custom-fit between each leg. This is all slow, fiddly work that goes well with a baseball game on the radio. Here's the final result:

And here it is test-fit on the vessel:

As previously discussed I'll be cutting off a small portion at the waterline but intend to do that once I have all three rings made and can be certain I do them all consistently in the right place. I think it's easier to build the whole wheel and cut it down than try to guess ahead of time exactly where I want the cutoff to be.

 

Overall I think it looks pretty good! Thanks, as always, for the kind comments and support.

 

 

 

[mbp521]

Looks great Eric! Tedious work to say the least. One down, two to go. 
 

-Brian

[FriedClams]

Time consuming and repetitive, but a very nice result, Eric.

 

Gary

[Ras Ambrioso]

Eric, I am getting close to your stage in the build of our respective paddlewheel. My last challenge is the paddle wheel itself. My little Unimat cannot swing the 2 5/8" diameter of the outer tire of the wheel. You have given me a great idea of how to build mine. Thanks.

[KeithAug]

A wheely good start on that paddle Eric. It does seem like quite a tedious job.

 

[Cathead]

Ras, happy to provide inspiration! I used a similar method on my other steamboats and it's become a comfortable approach for me. This time, as you'll see below, I only used one pattern and built successive wheels on the first one. Another approach would be to computer-design a pattern and print out a whole series so that each wheel can be assembled on its own pattern, I think I did it that way before too.

 

Here's some more weekend progress. I built the other two wheels directly over the first one, to ensure that they all matched. I'd rather have them all consistently eccentric than near-perfect but not matching. So I laid small strips of double-sided tape on the first wheel, then started hand-cutting and shaping each spoke to fit:

When they were all shaped, I glued the assembly together and used clamps to ensure it stayed parallel to the first pattern wheel while the glue dried. One thing to be careful of here is not to let glue squeeze out below such that the two wheels get glued together right at the hub where it's hard to get to. I tried to avoid this but it happened slightly; I was able to separate them with a thin knife. It would probably have made sense to put a thin piece of tape or other masking at the hub area to avoid this. But it worked out fine.

 

I then marked the locations for the spacers and slowly assembled those, too. The end result was three wheels that match pretty nicely for hand-made assemblages. At this point I also trimmed all the ends to be reasonably consistent in length.

I wanted some "hubs" to help bind these together, so cut a stack of thin discs from a dowel, painted them black, stacked them together with strips of double-sided tape, and drilled down the middle to create a consistent axle hole:

 

Then I painted the wheels and assembled each one with a hub on each side. Here they are threaded on an axle for show, but not in any final orientation:

 

Next up will be working on the "buckets", the proper name for the horizontal slats that actually grab the water.

 

It's nice to feel like I'm making some regular progress again. Thanks for reading!