"Greg Guarino" wrote in message
...
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?

I made wagon wheels for the cart in "Fiddler" using the technique you've
described. It was a high school production, so after cutting the circles at
home I had one of the students do all the jig saw work. The center hub was
a couple of pipe floor flanges screwed to the plywood. The next smaller
size pipe was used as the axle with pipe caps on each end. A large washer
held in place with a nail thru the axle was used on the side of the wheel
opposite the pipe cap to retain the wheel in position. A couple of artistic
students painted them and from the audience location, 20+ feet away, they
looked great.



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