"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'd be inclined to make the wheel in glued up layers... The spokes can be
quickly ripped on a table saw and the rim done in 1/4 circle segments on a
bandsaw using a pivot point (see Norm's circle cutter jig). Shorter
segments can be placed between the rim segments thus creating mortises...
with the rim segment joints staggered. The hub could be done the same way...
two disks with segments between them to create mortises. Let the spokes
protrude through the outside of the rim and then make the entire thing round
on the bandsaw using the circle cutting jig on the bandsaw. The last step
would be to the drill out the pivot hole to a larger size for an axle. This
approach would be quicker to cut out and cut way down on the waste...

John