Good day all! Hello from the Over the Water festival.
We do use a synthetic wheel in most of our instruments. We have been through a couple of formulations but, we are very pleased with the current results and we have been using this formula for a couple of years now. It is no longer necessary to use liquid rosin on our wheel. You can use ordinary violin rosin and after the initial settling-in period you only rosin them as often as you would a wood wheel. The reason we use a cast wheel is because it is more stable and produces a sweet and resonant tone. We don't wash our wheels, but it is very easy to clean finger grease and other contaminants from the wheel surface and it is rare to have to rescrape the wheel. These are not injection molded plastics. They are a special formulation on the inner wheel and band of casting resin and are hand cast and final shaped on the lathe and then hand scraped. Please understand that I love wood and the traditional look and feel of wood. I also know that the wheel is the heart of the hurdy-gurdy and if it has a problem your whole instrument has a problem. So, making the wheel of a material that is stable, attractive, protective and gives an excellent tone makes sense. Esthetics are a matter of personal taste, I think that the wheels that Wolfgang uses and the ones that we use are pleasing and in character with the instrument. I use MDF for lots of jigs and things in the workshop, but it wouldn't be my first choice for a wheel material, but that is just my taste, your mileage may vary. And I know that they do use MDF for many different types of furniture but, if I put a drop of water on a piece of MDF in our workshop, in a very short period of time there is a raised area which is difficult to sand out. Perhaps there are different formulations? I have only seen one but that doesn't mean there aren't others I am not aware of. We have put a lot of thought into our instruments and want to build an instrument that is as player friendly as possible. We are also trying to keep costs reasonable and so we look to the best material to do the job. We ship our instruments all over the world and it makes sense to use a material that will remain very stable in many different playing environments. Cali Hackmann
