Wooden blades will definitely outperform the PVC kind. My PVC blades seem to stall and never overspeed. The stall noise is a loud whosshing noise. I will try to build a mill without furling because of it. The beauty of PVC is that the blades can be shaped much more quickly. The problem is the inside curvature, which leads to bi- or triplane style wing profiles. Low speed!
Problems:
Gives me an idea - I found a piece of 8" PVC 30" long and am going to make blades this week; I'll try wrapping them in saran wrap (don't have monokote) to flatten the front and see what happens.
- Ed.[ Parent ]
That's another great point. Even my wood blades, which ARE poorly made by any official standards (read my post about the mistakes I made)... the one thing I can say about these blades, with the not-so-good airfoil shape, is that you can watch them accelerate. You can "see" the lift in action. I did NOT see that with my PVC / Barrel blades.[ Parent ]
