Tuckervill - Check out this website - they have a video that shows the process of creating the scrolls of mantras that are inserted in hand-held prayer wheels. Hopefully the video will show you what you want to see!

The reason those large prayer wheels are so hard to turn is they are full of paper scrolls covered in mantras written in tiny, tiny script. Think of the weight of all that paper!

I visited a Buddhist meditation center in Kathmandu that had a tiny prayer wheel (about the size of the end of my pinkie finger) designed to be worn on a chain around your neck - it contained a mantra (composed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama) which was reproduced in microscopic text hundreds of thousands of times.