A Waterwheel Test

The forecast was for 24 hours of continuous heavy rain! The perfect opportunity for a day in the workshop and what better project to be working on than a waterwheel!
The waterwheel will become part of a watermill that will disguise the outlet from the pond pump pipe for our emerging garden stream. The watermill building will be a modified Pendle Valley kit. The wheel comes from that kit but it was in a basic form and so it was adapted to create closed and larger “buckets” for the water from the leat to do its work. I didn’t know if it would actually work, but this morning the skies cleared a little and the chance arrived to test the wheel using a watering can. The position of the leat where it discharges water onto the wheel and, in particular, the amount of water flowing over both seem critical, but the test has revealed that it can be done! Some of the water from the stream will have to be split off to feed the leat, just as in the real, full sized world. A sluice gate of some sort with a fine adjustment will be needed to regulate the water flow …. and I may have just the thing in the scrap box.
More tests will follow in due course.