I made a Wheel. And then, a lot later, I made another Wheel.
Mar 24, 2024 7:10:21 GMT -5
Prizes, germanname1990, and 11 more like this
Post by duke on Mar 24, 2024 7:10:21 GMT -5
I’ve been a huge fan of Wheel of Fortune ever since it entered syndication. I even made my own Wheel! Twice!
My First Wheel
This old Wheel was made over 35 years ago.
I recently came across it alongside my trusty old 2nd edition home version. I *hated* that dinky spinner, but couldn’t afford Deluxe, so I lovingly built this first Wheel with Nana’s old lazy susan, construction paper, black marker, stencil, protractor, compass, and masking tape. The wedge lamination was a very expensive luxury for me at the time.
This project was active from 1988 until around 1992; note the presence of All-Cash TDV’s, the orange 900 at 10:30 from the Bankrupt, and the low DV sets from “Goen’s CBS Wheel of Daytime Cheapiness”. The last work I did on this wheel was to start remaking the wedges once I had a color inkjet printer. Color ink was an expensive luxury, though, so again that didn’t go far.
By the time I had money to continue the project, I no longer had time for the project with college, career, and other interests in the forefront. I always kept it stowed away safe for another day, though.
My Second Wheel
When I showed my old Wheel to my wife and she started showing and sharing interest in the game, I got to thinking, what kind of Wheel could I build today, with parts created from my 3D printer… Thinking turned into sketching, sketching turned into modeling, and then I started making test prints to validate design theories… Then I bought a vinyl cutter… Next thing I know, months have passed and today I am pleased to present my second working Wheel!
Some credit is due before I continue. As seems the case with so many projects around here, many thanks goes to MarioGS and wheelgenius for the wedge artwork that served as a reference for creating my wedges.
Main Features
(Cue "I Remember The Child" prize bed music if you have it 
)
)The Wheel itself is 28 and a half inches across (roughly 3:10 scale), with the outer base being roughly 33 and a half inches across. It is specifically made to fit a standard 34 inch card table. My wife says that if it were any bigger, it would qualify as furniture.
The Wheel has interchangeable layouts, and all wedges and tokens that are placed on the Wheel deck are held in place magnetically. To facilitate fast layout changes between rounds, a magnetic “Demispider” tile puller is used to quickly stack and pull up to four tiles (half of a layout) at a time. Plus, I have a small but growing collection of TDV and Prize add-on wedges, and plenty of Free Spins (in the newer style) to distribute.
By default there are three player stations configured the standard seven pegs apart, but the outer base can be reconfigured at will to support more players, fewer players, or different player positions. Player stations can be moved in increments of one peg (5 degrees).
All parts are designed to be modular, so if any of the (over 100) parts break or I think of an upgrade, a replacement is easily manufactured.
I also created a simple Puzzle Board application using Unreal Engine 5. Trilon background graphics are again thanks to wheelgenius and MarioGS. The app doesn’t (yet) keep track of score or turns, but allows picking a new puzzle at random (from the extensive BAV Puzzle Compendium, thanks so much!) guessing of letters, and solving. It even has a couple of special keys assigned for theme and prize bed music cues. A 48-key programmable keyboard is perfect as a controller for the Puzzle Board app.
Test Results
All of this was good enough for my wife and I to run a successful beta test of a 4-round game based on Season 4 rules and layouts. The only real notes we had from the session were that the card table legs need to be chopped roughly in half to lower the wheel for proper seated play, it’s difficult to both keep score and competitively think about the puzzle at the same time, and the computer at my workbench is too old and slow for Unreal 5 (15+ years!) and thus has laggy input. So very little needs to be changed about the wheel itself. We had a lot of fun, and my wife has been really excited to see the project coming together.
Boring Tech Details
Most parts are 3D-printed using PETG filament with some exceptions. I used PETG specifically because of its low shrink rate and strength, as sub-millimeter dimensional accuracy and durability was a chief concern for most parts. The pointers are printed using TPU filament. All 3D printed parts were designed by me.
The rotation is provided by a super-beefy 80mm bearing under the center, attached to a weighted base. Weight is provided by plaster-of-paris poured into the printed base parts. Support for the outer wheel is provided by 3D-printed strut/shock absorbers with smaller roller bearings mounted on them.
The spokes are quarter-inch shelf pins mounted into shelf pin sleeves and epoxied into the 3D-printed rim assembly. This solution is high-strength, I’ve yet to have a spoke come loose despite being yanked on pretty hard for spins. It is also very on-brand.
The pointer is mounted onto a replaceable cartridge with a shaft that has two opposing torsion springs printed into it. (I might switch to a different, less expensive and metal-free design for the pointer springs if it works out, so the springs for the yellow and blue player pointer are not complete yet).
Wedgework was accomplished using my vinyl cutter. The wedges are made with high-quality cardstock from Neenah and Worldwin Papers with a matte clear vinyl laminate applied for protection and to provide sheen with a deeply-shaded and dimensional “permadamp™” look that really pops. Lettering is done in black/white matte Oracal vinyl. The glitter cardstock for the TDVs is a very brilliant Sanzix brand. I had to invent my own technique to get the vinyl lettering to stick well to the glitter stock. The glitter stock on the Free Spins is vinyl from Styletech’s 2000 Ultra Glitter line.
Wedge artwork is largely based on and traced from MarioGS and wheelgenius’s prior work, so many thanks to them for providing a starting point. I created my own custom program to re-generate wedge vector artwork on-the-fly as I made adjustments to the design. This program exports artwork directly to SVG for cutting cardstock and vinyl. With my artwork generation program, I am able to create and generate custom wheel layouts on the fly, and the program will generate all of the necessary artwork files, and a manifest of materials needed and subassemblies to be created in order to build the layout.
The base layout wedges for each round are mounted onto eight three-wedge PETG tiles that are held to the wheel deck using embedded neodymium magnets. The center mat is also magnetically mounted. The eight layout tiles are 5/32” (3.9mm) thick.
Add-on wedges and tokens are mounted onto thin (1.75mm or just over 1/16” thick) add-on tiles that also have embedded magnets, allowing them to stick to the wedges beneath them. Magnets are placed directly in the middle of the hundreds and ones digit of a common value wedge, to properly accommodate magnetic on-wheel tokens like Free Spins.
I’m not completely happy with the gold parts of the outer trim. I think I made a poor choice with the Oracal gold, and want to go back and redo it with something that has a more metallic shine and a hue closer to what is seen on the Wheel dais trim in-episode for that era. The texturing on the gold trim was made using a deboss tip with the vinyl cutter.
I estimate that between failed designs, learning, color design, and the final production, I’ve used somewhere around 20kg of 3D printer filament in 15+ colors, 30 yards of vinyl, 45 square feet of cardstock in 10+ colors, and 450 magnets on this project so far, and have put over 1500 hours of print time on my 3D printer, as well as putting in much of my own free time on nights and weekends. It has all been well worth it, though.
The Future of My Second Wheel
From here, I will expand my library of wheel layouts and addon wedges. I have a project underway to identify as many prize wedge variants as possible (290 variants so far for syndicated seasons 1-7!), using both the recap information on this site, and source video that I have collected. I’m also collecting information on prize descriptions and music cues, creating a prize database. With so many prize wedges, this will definitely be an “over time” effort, and I will make the wedges starting from most popular to least, tracing SVG files for each from source video where possible. Here’s a proof-of-concept prize wedge made completely by me from source video, alongside said source (feel free to use, please credit):
Eventually, I will move beyond having just the “Classic” 1986-1998 palette and layouts that I am most fond of, going both backward to the “Vintage” 1974-1986 palette and layouts and forward to the “Refreshed” 1998-2006 palette and layouts and finally to the “HD” 2006-present layouts.
The outer base does not have lights yet, but I have wiring channels built in for adding them. I might mount a Hall sensor under the magnets in the wheel and use the output of that to drive the light animation via a microcontroller, so that the lights animate when the wheel is spun. I already have microcontroller-based animated light setup in my office, so the only new thing there will be learning to process the Hall sensor output.
I hope to expand the capabilities of the Puzzle Board app as well, making it capable of consuming more episodic information so that it can run a full game, be aware of wheel layouts, keep score, select prizes, allow configuration of games using rules from different eras and custom rules, and persisting player history.
We already have a queue of requests from friends for game nights using the Wheel. Given the game night requests, I will be printing a fourth player station (probably green), as well as some add-on penalty wedges for testing a four player game. The idea with the added penalty wedges is that with more players, we’ll want the player turns to cycle more, as well as adding an extra round or two.
I hope to release back to the community the databases I compile and the original artwork I create at some point, in both human-readable format and formats that can easily be consumed by tools that others write. I might even be able to release the layout generation app with some careful separation of artwork from original code. I’d even like to enhance the layout generator to support off-brand wedge proportions, off-brand wedge counts, and wheels other than WoF.
I also plan to release the 3D model files that I created for building the Wheel hardware, in case others are interested in adapting my design rather than starting from scratch.
Unfortunately, I think it’s doubtful that I will ever be able to release my puzzle board app due to fairly obvious IP concerns: It’s essentially going to be a fully working computerized WoF implementation/simulation, and I don’t see the big S being OK with that being released in the wild.
It would be lovely to be able to let the Wheel or some image recognition device tell the puzzle board what wedge was landed on, but that would be way down the road.
The Future of My First Wheel
Unfortunately, while my first wheel was fun back at the time, it is in an unplayable state now, and trying to restore it to a playable state would likely damage its legacy. After 30 years of storage, the adhesive in the masking tape holding every wedge onto the lazy susan is dried and brittle and comes off if you look at it funny. Replacing the tape risks damaging the somewhat brittle construction paper. This wheel and all of its accessories have been retired and will be preserved as a cherished memento. The second wheel is far superior in most aspects, anyway, except for the part where the second wheel is not made from Nana’s old lazy susan.
Conclusion
Thank you for letting me share my Wheel project. This forum has actually already helped a lot with this project, even if you all didn’t know it at the time while I was lurking and working. Again, I especially appreciate the efforts of MarioGS and wheelgenius with their fine wedgework.
If you have any questions about the Wheel build itself or techniques that I used, feel free to ask. I learned a lot during this project and I am more than willing to share. However, I ask that you not request any artwork, model files, database files, or software from me at this time. I just got this project to a minimum viable state, I need some time to clean things up first, and this all needs to occur in my spare time.
I’ll be sure to post updates on my progress and announce any public releases of files.
