So they finished their wind turbine in two days. Tuesday evening we sat around, had some beer and they rubbed linseed oil into their blades.
Brian brought me a really nice (at least compared to what Im used to!) 4 channel oscilloscope. So another Tuesday night activity was to look at the wave forms from two different alternators. Both the alternators in the picture have coils of the same size/shape - but one has 1" x 2" rectangular magnets, the other has 2" diameter round magnets.
The sine wave from one or the other (I don't remember). I would've expected a bit of a goofy wave especially from the one with the round magnets, but they both looked the same best I could tell, both generated very nice looking sine waves I thought.
So we had an extra day with nothing planned. We started the morning talking about towers, turnbuckles, cable clamps, winches etc. We lowered my 20' turbine as a demonstration. Then we went up to Rich's house. He built a single rotor, 7' machine almost 2 years ago now and it's never flown. (the page about that machine is here: http://www.otherpower.com/7windturbine.html )
It was a cold/windy day....
Pictured above George is standing next to the nearly completed tower. The tower is 49' tall.
Brian and I runnng wires through the alternator...
Installing the alternator on the tower top.
This machine has been kicking around outside now for a while. The polyester resin the magnet rotors is coming apart. We'll see how long it lasts... (I really dislike polyester resin these days)
Rich is all grins about his wind turbine project coming together! Pictured above he wires up the alternator for testing. (the line is not run to his cabin yet so for testing we just hooked it up to a car battery at the tower base)
I'm all grins too at the thought of finally getting this done. Rich's cabin is in the back ground. Pictured above it's all assembled and ready to go. Believe it or not - there is no winch. We pulled this 49' tower up - 6 people pulling on ropes attached to the gin pole. It wasn't easy but it went up fine. We'll add a block/tackle to make it easier in the future.
Another fun project finished! It was breezy too so we got to see how this little machine performed.
I had my doubts about this design but it was nice to get it up on a tower and watch it. I was very pleased. The blades are totally silent, you can barely hear a hum from the alternator. The machine starts up very easily and is very quick to make 100 - 400 Watts. (best I saw was 400 Watts) It starts to furl at about exactly 300 Watts. Nice little wind turbine I think (time will tell) and one heck of a fun/productive 3 days! A big thank you to Brian, Jessica and Kevin - we had a good time!
