On Fri, 3 Jan 2014 07:29:39 -0500, "Mike Marlow"
wrote:

Greg Guarino wrote:
My wife and daughter perform in a community theater group. The group
has decided on "Oklahoma!" for this summer's production. The biggest
set construction challenge will be the surrey, specifically the spoked
wheels. I may decide to help out with the building.

I have no familiarity with the show, but apparently the surrey will
have to carry two people on four wheels. My first thought was to cut
out a bunch of pie slice holes from a sheet of 3/4" ply, like this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gdguarino/11717012293/

Leaving aside that this would be a heck of a lot of tedious jigsaw
work (and routering to make the wheels round), do you think the
resulting wheel would be structurally sufficient?

We'd have to layer on some disks at the center to make a "hub", that
much I'm sure of. And I saw a video online in which a college
production (with access to a large shop, a bigger budget and a lot of
free labor) seems to have layered extra plywood circles on either
side of the outer edge to thicken the wheels. That made it look more
authentic, to be sure, but I wonder if it was structurally necessary.
If not, I'm sure "our" team would decide to forgo the extra work.
Incidentally, unless the extra layers were made in half- or
quarter-circles, that's a lot of ply to waste.

I considered other ideas as well (wooden hub and circumference, EMT
tubing for spokes), but so far the ones I've thought of seem like they
would require more precision than is likely to be available.

Any suggestions would be welcome. As an aside, does Sketchup always
make circles as such visibly-obvious polygons?

That's a lot of work Greg - I'd just rent one from a local stable.
Or at least rent-borrow the undercarriage.

Around here it would not be hard to find a set of wheels to buy/borrow
(getting harder every year, but the old order and amish just to the
west still use them on their every-day buggies, while the local
Newborns use automotive wheels - usually the mini-spares that they can
get from the wreckers for free.)