Waterwheel Display

A trip back a few years now, this was built as my GCSE Product Design project. At the start of my GCSEs I chose to do Art as one of my options for some reason that I've yet to be able to understand, anyway, it didn't take me long to come to the conclusion that I'd rather have another set of lessons in a proper workshop (I was already doing Systems and Control) as opposed to drawing fruit!

Anyway, this was my product for the final project, the brief I was given was something about an interactive exhibit for a science museum, so I built this set of water wheels. It shows clearly the operation of the overshot, undershot and breastshot water wheels. The clear tank sides were all laser cut - my first use of CAD/CAM in anything I had made, but the rest of the acrylic components were all cut by hand, with the edges the finished to smooth by hand - not fun. The pump used is a windscreen wiper pump and sits in a tank under the wheels, pumping water through a series of pipework to the different wheels. Unfortunately, I under-estimated the capacity of the pump and didn't put a big enough drain hole to return water to the feed tank, so eventually, the wheel chambers get flooded and stop the working of the wheels! One day...

The Engineer.