We've had more set backs than I could have imagined with the wind turbine project.
I'll post this as a new thread since I was criticized for hijacking the vinyl ester thread. in which I documented the complete failure of the first attempt at making the vinyl resin stator. Dad and my brother were here while I mixed and poured the resin. Dad's a retired chemist, and both my brother and I have experience with resins too.
Dad converted the ratio of hardener for the quantity were were mixing, and this came out very close to my guesstimate. From our workshop in Colorado I recalled that we mixed equal amounts of alumina hydrate (the filler) with vinyl resin. Mixing this with a paint stirrer on the portable drill, we then added the hardener, in slightly less quantity than the directions called for to give us a little more time to pour the resin before it hardened. I mixed the hardener in for five minutes with the mixing paddle at a slow speed.
Above we got the layout of the coils even.
I've been wracking my brain trying to figure why the resin didn't harden. Now that I write about this and this goes a long way to proving that writing is good for thinking. Maybe the fact that we added an equal amount of filler to the resin we should have doubled the amount of hardener? We did wonder if adding 48 ounces of filler was going to actually increase the volume in the mixing container, and Jackson asked whether the filler or hardener should be mixed in first, and what effect the hardener was going to have on the extra bulk of the filler. Well it didn't seem like the filler added a lot of bulk to the resin, so we assumed that extra hardener wouldn't be needed, a mistake that I now see may have caused the resin to harden on the outside before the inside. It appears that there just wasn't enough hardener for the resin and filler. It is too bad that we had to sacrifice a mold and a set of copper coils to learn this lesson.
Above I had to braze tabs to solder the wires to the bolts used for wiring lugs.
Yeah, it's a bummer that the mold is coming apart when we try and separate the top from the bottom. We do not know if the petroleum jelly we used is just unsuitable for mold release or the long drying and hardening time of the resin caused the vinyl to stick to the wooden mold, but stick it did. It's stucker than we could have hoped for if we were trying to glue it in there. On top of that since I didn't know the resin wasn't dry I took the "C" clamps off the mold and set the mold and stator on its side to prepare to demonstrate it at Synergy Fest. Bad move, but who knew? I noticed right away that liquid resin was dripping out of the mold. We were running late for Synergy Fest that morning so I did not think about what was happening. I did set the mold back down flat, but I should have put the "C" clamps back on. The result was that the mold was no longer tight and the stator wouldn't dry with perfectly parallel sides. So even if the mold release did work like it was supposed to, the stator would have been unusable because the precision thickness was ruined. The magnet rotors need to be like an 1/8th of an inch away from the coils for efficient power creation. A stator which isn't perfectly flat absolutely will not work.
Above the mold outside on a sunny and warm day for pouring.
Again, the stator casting project failed on at least three levels. The hardener proportion was off which screwed up the drying time and consistency of the plastic. I didn't think about this and let the mold loose to dry as it were, unevenly. Then the mold release was completely ineffective. When I tried to pull the top off the mold on the second day the center of the resin was still wet and the outside of the resin which was hard and stuck to the mold separated from the other side and I could see the coils pull apart. Game over, right then.
It is sad, no doubt about that. On the other hand, we got to learn several lessons on this first attempt at making the stator. Maybe this is a good thing. I mean if only one thing went wrong like we were unable to release the mold, the whole attempt would still have been for naught. We still would need to make a new mold, we still need to make more coils. Surely this time I can do a better job of winding the coils for better consistency. It will make spacing the coils a heck of a lot easier if the coils are all exactly the same shape.
So there you have it, another damn learning experience.
I'll get back on that horse before I forget what I learned, to be sure.
Sincerely, |
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