Guy radius was 8.4m, origional rotor was 3.6m diamiter. It was up for two days making up to 80 amps in gail force winds and furling.

We had not had time to retension the guy wires, the rotor was too big for that tower and they were some of the strongest winds recorded here. Basically having limited funds I skimped on the tower, so one could say designer error.

We rebuilt the tower to 19.5m, carved new blades (3.6m) and hoisted it again. We had to remake the middle rotor as it had cracked. Up for one week this time, gail force winds again, doing 60+  amps and threw a weight, vibrating like hell, I tried shorting it out but alas it laughed at me and just made 80 amps. Threw magnets all over the place, as the middle rotor disintergrated (no metal backing disc) still have not forund 3 of them.

Siezing a lull in the wind I began to lower the tower, and another learning. It bent double and crashed, picture Allan standing there scratching his date saying what the @#** happened, Allan's 4th law of towers just came home to roost.

But you get that on the big jobs, so tower #3 and named Pheonex.

It has 300mm (12") discs, 12 magnets/ disc although they are actually wedge shape 40x20x50mm 4mm thick doubled up. It has 10 coils of 0.9mm wire bifiliar wound for 135 turns. Wired as per Hugh's directions every coil start connected to a star point with each end of matched pairs to a 35 amp bridge rectifier.

I added a steady bearing to the lower part of the pipe over pipe piviot, as it was just one more wobbly bit.

It has a stub axel and trailer hub as the bearing, we have the allthread long enough so as the blades are held apart from the rotors. This allows us to adjust the tracking very easily, another learning. Next one I will not use a trailer hub.

When we first raised it we had fine gap and were not happy so lowered it and added 1mm to the gap. This did not seem to make any difference to the cut in speed 185 rpm @ 25V.

We opted for a different blade design this time as the others were very noisy, not that I mind. I have industrial deafness and like to hear them anyway. We seem to have jagged it right, tsr 6 which as Flux said in an earlier post, is probally the reason it's quite.

I calculated the cut in from one test coil hand held in the rotor, and got it right. It's not a fast machine my calculation have it at 264 rpm at 1 kw (40 amps @ 25v), or 346 rpm at 2 kw if it gets there. Fortunatly I can't be proved wrong my speed indication, (monitoring the ac waveform) goes to hash once cut in speed is reached.

So there we have it, its a fantastic design Hugh, we have modified some points but....
I look forward to the day we are adressing him as Sir Hugh Piggot, the basic design makes wind power available to most people wherever they be, through the use of available parts(his intention I believe).

Oh did I say Grant's (Trivio here) lathe and milling machine arived at my place yesterday, he is moving and needed to "store" them, awsom I always wanted a lathe but could never quite justify the cost. Now these are no normal machines 3 men and a dog struggled to unload them even with the platform on the back of the moving truck.