Wheel Band spiral for mounting on hurdy gurdies

thingiverse

Wheel band printed for your Hurdy Gurdy to play without cotton. Flexible filament tested, but flexible PLA may work too. When you only have a 10 cm x 10 cm print surface, you can't print a full closed wheel out of TPU. It's also the solution when you can't unmount your wheel. Don't forget to remove the strings before (or get them far from the wheel) to avoid any damage during mounting. It adds circa 1 mm to the radius of the wheel. If you don't have any play room at the wheel hole, then you'll need to remove some wood from the wheel by sanding the wheel edge with sandpaper or files under fast rotation of the wheel... To do it properly, watch some tutorials that are also available for the Nerdy Gurdy of Jaap Brandt. So, the trick is to print a flexible spiral band and then glue it with wood glue to the wheel of your hurdy gurdy with a diagonal cut like you would do for a wood veneer (birch or mahogany). Close the "circle" making the spiral all around the wheel (one single turn). For closing it, cut again on the diagonal along the other one. The nice thing about TPU is that you can stretch it to join side to side the already glued side. Use power tape to maintain the two edges together and let the glue cure overnight. Then finish the surface with a heating device (a heating knife for finishing the surface) in order to smooth it a bit (not with a heat gun here). Be very gentle! A further tip: I did the band to match 12 mm of wheel thickness. You can always increase the height from all modern slicers. Do that to get 15mm or more in height if you need, but be careful not to make it too big. You can find a better description in French on the website Tradzone where I described with pictures what I did. I also made my own artificial colophony liquid for your gurdy. It has been adapted on a nerdy gurdy wheel 14 cm diameter. But you can add it to bigger wheels as well. The spiral is 10 cm longer than what you need to cover the wheel. Extra length is always good! UPDATE: I realized that the spiral, which was done with Inkscape, was not seamless. It created several seam points that are reinforced. These can cause annoying jumps of the strings due to non-straight geometry. So, knowing this, I used the spirale tool from Freecad instead. Which worked like a charm! Therefore, I can propose this v2 seamless. Regards, Frog