Page 301 - The Lost Ways

maintained because the buckets empty as they near the bottom of the water wheel’s
rotation.

As we can see from this diagram, this
leaves only about a third of the buckets
with any water in them at all and only a
few that are nearly full.

Water weighs 8 pounds per gallon, and

there are 7.48 gallons in a cubic foot of
water. So even if each of those buckets
only held a cubic foot, we’re talking
roughly 300 pounds of water weight in
the wheel at any one time.

The buckets on a typical water wheel are
made by dividing two parallel wood disks into sections with boards. The center of these
disks is typically open, as in the diagram, with nothing more than a couple of beams to

carry the force of the water wheel to the axle.

If the divider boards are placed at an angle, as in the drawing, rather than perpendicular
to the axle, the buckets will hold more water, increasing the total weight of water
available to produce force. Had I drawn the diagram above with the boards perpendicular
to the axle, the water wheel would have held less than half the water in the buckets, with
a correspondingly lower amount of total force available.

But that’s only part of where the water wheel’s force comes from. The wheel itself is a
giant lever, or perhaps it is easier to think of it as a whole bunch of levers formed into a
circle. These levers are offset to the extreme, making for a very high multiplication of the
force they are producing.

The fulcrum of this lever is the center of the axle, with the buckets of water on one side
and the other side being nothing more than the distance from the center of the axle to

the far side, otherwise known as the radius of the axle.

300