an overbalanced wheel is a cool concept and i wanted to make one despite them not breaking the laws of physics

there are 3 main parts to the wheel: the body, the arms, and the stand

the body design was easy enough (or so i thought) : just a big gear thing that lets the arms swing down and lock in place, while still being able to fall back down

the arms design was the first major consideration, and after a bit of sketching, i decided on a potential route: making the arms parallel to the faces of the wheel rather than making the arms perpendicular. The advantages of parallel would be less air resistance, a thinner cross-section, less material used. The tradeoffs were that i would need to use axles, and i would need some modification to the arms to make sure they stopped on the wheel where they were supposed to.

so those stoppers ended up giving me more grief than i had thought

as we can see, with the stopper designed as it was, the arm could barely move at all when the wheel was rotated

i could have either redesigned the stopper or made modifications to the wheel to accommodate them

i opted for the latter because it made the wheel look cooler

so with the arms all sorted out, it was just a matter of slapping some spacers in between the 2 sides of the wheel and sandwiching the arms in between on some axles

the stand is really straightforward, just involving me making a rectangle with some holes at a distance to where the wheel has some space to spin

just needed to measure the height that the holes needed to be at to make sure the wheel doesnt drag on the ground

not too bad

(not pictured: me struggling for the better part of an hour to get all 16 of those stupid pegs in the little holes in the arms to make the stopper)

after all was said and done, i had some ugly holes where the axles were holding in the arms, so i used the vinyl cutter to make circles ala your hard drive to hide them

and for funsies, i added the equation for the energy that would theoretically be produced if there wasnt an opposing torque at the bottom of the wheel being produced