Here are some photos of a project I'm working on locally to restore an old waterwheel. These first 3 pictures are of the wheel as I found it. It has been used in recent years to provide electricity via an alternator but unfortunately the transmission broke and the wheel has laid in it's current state for several years.

These photos show the old wheel sections being removed, unfortunately because of the access to the site a gantry had to be constructed over the wheel to lift out the parts.

Once the cast sections were removed the shaft and bearings could be removed as these needed replacing also.

Here you can see it all taking shape again, I made a new square section shaft, sourced a ships propeller shaft bearing for one end and fabricated a new bronze bearing for the other.

The 56 new buckets were fabricated by a local firm, then I bolted them all in on top of the inner band of steel with 9 bolts to each bucket!

All that is left for this stage of the restoration is to fit the feed race to the wheel so that water can again flow over it! Watch this space as I will update when I get the race fitted and it's up and running again!

The next stage if the customer decides to, is to design and build the power train to run the alternator so the wheel can again earn it's keep. The problem here is that the wheel turns at approx 6 rpm and the alternator requires 1500rpm.The step up is not a problem but the maximum torque at the waterwheel shaft is in the region of 10000lb/ft!

The original solution was a large (half ton) winch gearbox which was driven in reverse from the waterwheel shaft and then through a series of 2 V-belt drives the necessary shaft speed was achieved, this did work but the belts weren't very reliable and when they broke the wheel would free run which I believe caused a lot of the damage.

I have managed to source a huge hydraulic motor/pump that is rated in excess of the above torque that I am hoping to couple to the shaft to provide the necessary speed increase. The theory behind this is that the large capacity of oil displaced by the hydraulic pump will run a much smaller hydraulic motor at the higher speed required for the alternator, again watch this space!