see if you can find some info on rick joy's doors... some of those are massive pivots... much heavier than you may need, but a great precedent

You may be better off structuring the panel out of steel with either a diagonal brace or a fully welded frame. I think wood framing won’t survive long in a dynamic cantilever like this (unless you plywood both sides and make a diaphragm out of it???).

Do you want the mechanics exposed or concealed? In any case, I would look at buying an industrial ball bearing race off the shelf and have a custom seat machined for it.

What do you mean by concealed at the edges?

Clear skateboard wheels (the small ones) make interesting “casters” for this kind of application.

you can check out the following rotating door at sarah lawrence college that polshek partnership did. i second daver's comments on a welded steel frame. you'll need it be more rigid than wood will be able to provide. the sarah lawrence door utlized a welded steel frame and a specially machined pivot point at the top and bottom which is very similar to the detail that daver described. if you do it properly you can get away without the caster, but if you want it...definitely skateboard wheels are about as good as you can get in terms of taking weight and having a smooth ride.
you might also want to check out the dash dogs that lewis tsuranamaki lewis did in nyc...they have a metal plate clad door that has a skateboard wheel caster detail in it....pretty nice and smooth.

This may be off base, but if you are only concerned with the function of the wall, not designing the aesthetic coolness of that function, I'd say try not to reinvent the wheel. Maybe a company that does panic rooms and the like might have a system set up to rotate a wall? You can then focus on integrating the appearance into the surrounding wall.

But as I said, if the appearance of the mechanical function is part of your design, that's a different approach and sounds more fun. Good luck with it.

Doors of all kinds can be tricky! If their just a little bit out of wack you will have a problem. I have seen it time and time again. In Tucson there is the old office building of CNWC Architects on Alvernon Waywhere they had a pair of monster front doors built out of Redwood Planks. I think they were 4'-0" Wide by 12'-0" tall. They worked off of a bottom mount and top mount pivot hinge. The anchor plate was polished chrome. I don't know if it was an off the shelf item or something dreamed up by John Morrison, but the doors were like butter.

casters.com is a great resource for this kind of thing. They've got an incredible selection.

What a cool idea! I hope it's to be concealed in a library wall and has a ledge sufficient to allow someone to perch on it as it turns from said library to the bat cave behind.

is it gonna have a bookcase like in young frankenstein?

I would stay away from casters though...you're going to get a line on the floor...

casters.com has rotating wheels... rubber... don't leave lines... check out the link.

-- hey salty,

visit a machine shop and take a peek into the McMaster Carr catalog. you should be consulting a welder who is a bit machine shop savvy.

you need very heavy duty ball bearings welded to fixed plates. you need a stainless steel ball held in place with a spring, think computer mouse. Forget that awkward looking caster. Need a lot of things. You need a welder to design this with you. too many bells and whistles involved.

I disagree with omen. This can be done very simply. One of my old offices did a beautiful rotating wall with invisible mechanism at almost the exact size that salty is describing. One way to do it is the plywood sheathing way... to make a rigid diaphragm, as someone else described. Can't remember how the wall itself was built at my former office, but I know they used pivot hardware at one end (not sure of the brand, but it could have been Stanley heavy duty stuff) and a big hidden wheel at the other end.

With a fixed point and a large arc like that, you don't really need a caster. A wheel will be fine since it is not ever going to be travelling in more than one dimension. Hard to describe but basically the wheel itself will just be rolling forward and backward. No welding, no ball bearings, nothing.

I worked on another project with John Morrison where we had two large top hung sliding doors which were hung from a Large W Flange
Beam. think the doors were 18' X 18' each. He didn't want a bottom
track with a wheel, because he felt it would be a problem keeping clean. So to make a long story short it was the deflection of the beam under load which determined what size beam we ended up using. If you had to much deflection the damn door would bind while traveling from the suspended track. Once again the thing worked like butter.

check out this door

this is a 9'-0" x 9'-0" door made of eucalyptus that weighs about 550 lbs... this is probably a bit more complex than you need, but it was hand-built by Mike Calvino, an architect here in the tampa, florida area for a house that he is designing/building for a client... the house is finally almost complete after about 5 years of construction... mike has built literally almost everything by hand from building some huge glulam trusses to milling the wood flooring...