Pump-Car Wheels
I wasn’t exactly sure how to go about making the flanged rail car wheels for the pump car. At first, I was thinking about using a lathe to make an accurate version of a flanged wheel, even though I knew that it wasn’t going to be much fun making four wheels with duplicate dimensions. After a quick e-mail conversation with Lynn Doughty ( OutWestWoodcarving…you can find the link on the right-hand side of this page ), my thinking on this went in a different direction.
I ended up using a hole saw to make various depth cuts of concentric circles. I think I ended up with a fairly decent looking flanged wheel.
This was a little bit of trial-and-error and I first started by making a variety of cuts into some 7-ply plywood that I had laying around. Basically, I inserted some of the smaller cutting rings and bored into the wood to a shallow depth to make a hub around an axle, then I removed those inner rings and replaced them with some outer rings to cut a raised lip around the flange, and then finally took out those cutting rings and replaced it with the outermost cutting ring and cut completely through the plywood, releasing the wheel.
Once I cleaned out the raised rings, it started to look like a flanged wheel but it looked just too thin for me.
So I took the wheels and glued the flat backs of the wheels to the plywood sheet again and began the boring process again so that I’d end up with a thicker end product.
After some cleaning out of the cut ridges, I ended up with the wheel in the first picture. Hope that this wasn’t too confusing. If you give it a try, you’ll quickly understand how it comes together.
tributesinwood 