Windmill Progress Report

[SparWeb]

After a troubled month of March, I'm making progress again.

I picked up all the pipe I need to make a tilt-up tower in February, and it's slowly been going together since.  Using a scrap aluminum plate to align the holes, here's the windmill head under construction.  I had trouble finding the right hole locations, because I built in a 5 degree incline to the hub's axis (for blade clearance).

I can tack-weld my stuff in my garage with the little gas welding set I own, but to finish I'll take it to the shop at work where it can be finished very quickly.

Before finishing, I mounted the rotor and stator - just loosely - to check one last time.

The blades are all ready, too - Almost there!!!

[Flux]

Looks nice.

Those threaded rods holding the stator don't look to be very rigid against torsion, perhaps you have other things planned for the final assembly. Thick spacers on the rods or tangential braces would be worth considering if you haven't covered that.

Flux

[kitestrings]

SparW,

Nice workmanship.  I like your blade jigs.  I made some a while back out of pexi-glass on a jigsaw, but I wish I'd left the extensions longer as you have here.  What type of wood are they?

Good luck with it.

-kitestrings

[dinges]

Hello Steven,

After recovering from the first shock (it's not a motor conversion, is it...? ) I must say that it looks very nice.

Tack welding it at your leisure at home and getting it fixed right seems like a clever thing to do, if you can get professional welders to finish it at work. It takes another thing that could possibly go wrong off the list.

I was planning on using little cardboard jigs too to make sure all three blades have the same profile. Good to see it being used by you.

Regards,

[SparWeb]

The blades are cedar.  I glued several boards together, as you're supposed to, to minimize warping.  This cedar was a good choice: I started out cutting the blades with power tools, but after wasting a lot of time, I ended up doing most of the work by hand.  The cedar cut so well with a spokeshave that there simply was no need to risk over-cutting a blade with a power tool.

[SparWeb]

Peter,

Fooled you, did I!  The motor conversion still waits on my bench, to be mounted in turn...

Tack welding at home works very well, until you strike a part too hard, and break the little weld ligament...  No plan is perfect, but I've had no real trouble myself, so far.

[SparWeb]

Yes, that's what I thought when I finally put it together.  It wasn't so obvious on paper.  For now, I'll take advantage of the flexibility to help line up the stator axis with the hub axis.  (I expect some travel after final welding.)  Then sort that issue out in time.

[hiker]

use a bunch of nuts the full length of the all thread to make the mounting bolts more

sturdy--or slide some small dia. steel pipe over the all thread--hold togeather with

whashers....