Yesterday we flew the mill for the first time a whole day in one go.
It went pretty good, all things considered, all the major parts were still on the machine when we checked it in the morning. (read that as 'it still had three blades').
Peak power was 1280 Watts in a 24 mph wind, not great, but the windings are still in parallel because I can't trust it fully until I have seen the feathering work.
Then, after this successful run we decided to mess it all up... Temporary insanity, if it works don't fix it and all that... We took the machine down and removed all the weights, then tried a new way of balancing it from scratch, resulting in much less weight on the blades (there was some 'common' weight, and on a three blader you should never have to add weight to all three blades...).
We also improved the tracking still further, that's an ongoing process.
After that we tried flying it, but it shakes badly.
We'll be building a rig tomorrow that holds a drillpress on it's side, that will drive the machine via a belt. That way we're not depending on the weather and it will give us a possibility to run the machine at it's rated speed (with the blades 'flat') to see if the feathering works.
If it does we'll switch to high voltage, if not we'll leave it like it is until we have a fix for whatever problem might occur.
