My feathering paddle wheel pond boat

With much research from this forum I built a feathering paddle wheel for my pond boat.
I just finished building this, so there is a lot more testing to do.
Pretty happy with the results so far.
Wiper motor was used for design video.
It is now powered by a 250 watt gear reduction electric scooter motor.

 

I am very happy with the lack of water being thrown in the boat.

 

Looking good so far! Was the mechanism 3-D printed? I could see a potential problem with the exposed gears catching weeds of other floating debris. How do you steer it?

 

Thanks
It is all cnc cut from HDPE (StarBoard).
The paddles are pvc board
The gears may end up enclosed with a thin cover.
Debating on that at the moment.
The gears have clearance to allow some debris to not jam them up.
Most of the splash is from the gear assembly, so I will test that.

There is a rudder on the back controlled by a stick steer.
You can see the orange connecting rod in the pond video.

 

I love the ingenious Feathering paddles, they seem to help with splashing and efficiency! Have you measured speed, seems faster than what a trolling motor set at 250 Watts would give..

 

Thanks
That was about 90 rpm and no water made it in the boat, so I am very happy with the wheel design.

That run was 2.5 mph at 230 watts. Very close to what my trolling motor does.
These hulls are pretty draggy. My 55lb trolling motor draws 10 amps at 2 mph and 50 amps to go 3.5 mph!
I am going to gear it up and do much more testing.

 

An unscientific hunch, but I suspect that speeding up the wheel will may not get you much more performance before the floats just churn the water more than pushing it. I think the remedy for that would be to make the wheel bigger instead of faster.

Also, it looked as if you left the edges of the floats just cut off square. If so, try tapering the edges; it should reduce the amount of splashing even more.

 

I thought about kayak/canoe paddles or oars that would keep blade more perpendicular through stroke but could figure out a slick way to do it.

MAYBE with oars in oar locks a push rod mounted to hull could work, at least for the first part of stroke. Maybe have the blade mounted by a pivot on its top in the middle and have the blade trailing the shaft. Might be able to still do a normal return stoke where oars are used to skim and balance when oars the rotated 90deg.

 

Making the wheel bigger or speeding it up does about the same thing ( the bigger wheel does keep the float in the water a longer distance) but the speed the paddle goes through the water is a function of the radius of the wheel and its rpm.

I will look into doing something with the paddle edges though.

I was limited on wheel size by the material I had on hand

 

There is a guy that built a canoe with what your talking about.
Pretty cool.
He made a long trip in England for charity. I will try to post a link.

 

That's really slick, haven't seen the geared method of keeping blades parallel to motion, looks more effective than feathering blades. The most efficient propulsion involves moving the most water the least amount, less slippage. Which would entail as wide a blade set as you can reasonably fit. Optimum depth of engagement involves a number of variables and I suspect best determined by experimentation. Slightly cupped blades with sharp leading edges might be worth the effort.
FWIW here's another take on paddle drive that I had nothing to do with but found fascinating and effective.

 

Thank You
I am sure I will work on the shape of the blades as this project moves forward.
I also want to close in the lightning holes in the wheel and test that.

The main purpose of this wackyness is to get up a very shallow river and not have to beat up my trolling motor.
Plus this stuff is fun.

That video is a very clean design, I had not seen that one.

 

Lots of experimentation with paddlewheels has been done over the years. National and World event competition tends to bring out the best shapes and Arrangements. This link has pictures which may give you some ideas about the really efficient paddle Wheels, including some of the cup shaped and other configuration,

UniversityDisplacementHPBs http://www.humanpoweredboats.com/Photos/UniversityDisplacementHPBs/UniversityDisplacementHPBs.htm

If you look under University competition, there is the Clementine and others and some of the other headings may have something worthwhile. Most cannot match the efficiency of props because of extra weight, space, windage, aspects, etc. I don't believe there has been a Paddle Wheel world record holder, at least in human power.

 

Here's a way I developed and have been using to handle very shallow water for decades, which works better than paddle wheels for my applications, but of course it may not work for everyone! Video clip at post 53 and 54,

Prop Shaft Systems. https://www.boatdesign.net/threads/prop-shaft-systems.24636/page-4#post-286133

 

Very Interesting.
Looks like it wont work but obviously does.
Good job