You are entirely welcome JIm, it is questions and interest from people like you that makes my day, and I hope that those that stop by can understand some of the mill technology from years gone by.
Our mill as it operates today uses a barrel wheel, or as some prefer to call it a Rose Wheel, there are pictures of it in past posts on this very chat site, itmay take alittle looking around to find them, but you might just run across some other tidbits that are quite interesting that deal with many other subjects, including the original one hewing timber by hand with a broadaxe, this in itself is quite a varied subject depending on who you are talking to, and what part of the globe you are from.
The term Rose Wheel I expect is derived from the cast iron collars on each sideof the Barrel Wheel's box, These collars fit on tapered surfaces on the 12" oak shaft and rotate with the shaft at about 1\4" clearance from the sides of the box creating a pressurized interior cavity. One of the main enemies of this set up is believe it or not a single square nail, if one happens to work its way along the head race and enters the pressurized area on its way out it could get lodged between the collar and the wooden oak box, 1\4" being just the right gap for it to enter and hang by its head. If this happens it is very difficult to remove, and will stop the mill dead in its tracks.
To get back to the term Rose Wheel, the cast iron collars referred to above have multiple cups casted into each one in such a way to give it an appearance of rose pedals.
One interesting feature about these collars is that the 2 of them are like a reflection in a mirror and applied on each side of the Box gives thrust in the same direction.
The produced power from our setup at UCV with an 8 foot head of water and at full throttle is about 6 horsepower, which does not seem like much in our world but remember whatI said above once you have the whole setup revolving say at 80 rpm it is developing far more power than that simply because of the mass of all the revolving parts, including the force of the water. At full throttle 2000 gals or approx 10 tons of water is forcing its way into the pressurized cavity every minute, and then trying to find its way out, that is when you capture useful energy to work with.
I have had course to measure the horsepower at full throttle (125 rpm) with the machinery revolving and I estimate that for brief periods you could have 20 horsepower of useful (smooth)energy.
