Vintage 702 aermotor windmill – making the wheel [2]

After lots of research in order to understand how the wheel is built, I managed to draw very accurate plans and a 3D model of the entire windmill.

The next challenge was to build the wheel. Drawing it is one thing, scratch building it is a complete different story. I made a few small modifications to the real structure of the wheel. The real structure, when built in scale would have been to unstable. This way I feel very confident that it’s going to last.

I used 0,5 mm steel wire for the wheel arms and styrene for the hub (axis) and inner and outer wheel bands. In the last picture you’ll see the wheel structure assembled. The arm crosses (tiny pieces connecting each pair of arms) are made out soda can aluminum.

In the following pictures you see the process of making the wheel structure. In a future post I’ll show you the process of installing the sails.

Tagged as: molino de viento, windmill