What can you do with this ?

[Tommy L]

I did this

From the printer I took the steppermotor. From the hard disk I take a piece of the

cover to cut a round piece for the hub, for blades I cut pieces of a plastic bucket.

I found a holder for a old antenna that I use for the tail.

This is my first attempt to do a windgenny. It give 13 V in 6 m/s (12 mph), without any load,

I try to put a 5 W 12 V lamp to it, but it didnt even start.

The only piece I have to buy was the diode for the rectifier, the rest I found i my garage.

Tommy L / Sweden

[gibsonfvse]

Wow... you rock!  True reuse/recycling at its finest.  Though I wonder if one could use the hard drive motors (either platter or stepper) as the alternators?  I don't know the architecture off the top of my head.

[drdongle]

You do Rube Goldburg proud.

Carpe Vigor

Dr.D

[wooferhound]

> I try to put a 5 W 12 V lamp to it, but it didnt even start.

Try LEDs

Sounds like you need a bigger prop to pull the load, or faster wind, did you try spinning it by hand or with a stick? What is the resistance of the motor windings?

PVC Pipe prop plans on this page...

http://66.140.203.100/gallery/woofer

[Tommy L]

Thank,s for all positive response, as I mention earlier this is my first try in wind.

LED is my next test. This project start as a way to maintenance loading my boat and tractor battery in my summer house during winter.

Tommy L / Sweden

[Norm]

  Really nice way of mounting the blades...first time I saw them in (Dollartree??)

 I thought of doing that but decided to make a VAWT instead....





This is one of three in a tier of various colors......going to use a slightly

larger pm blower motor after I rewind the armature for a lower rpm.

             Like I said...Really neat little job you've done there!

                   ( :>) Norm.

[RogerAS]

Tommy,

I've done the same thing with plastic box fan blades, 20" type. I wonder about your rectification. You should have 3 phases or more in the stepper. Either the motor needs an array of diodes or seperate bridges for each phase. I put a 3300uF 25V capacitor on the dc side to smooth things out. A simple method to isolate phases is to short 2 wires together and note the cogging. When the motor becomes harder to turn that's one phase. The steppers I use come from old 5 1/4" floppy drives, the head position motor usually having 5 wires coming out. I see about 500 milli amp in a good stiff wind. I've yet to see one of these light a tail light bulb, 1147 type. However when 6 or 8 of these get going and the output is combined I have seen almost 4 amps and that will make the bulb shine pretty good.

Congrats!!

RogerAS

[Tommy L]

Hi !

This is a picture of my diodebridge

That capacitor is the next thing to put on it, the first thing is to change the stepper to a bigger one, and bigger blades.

/ Tommy

[tecker]

Yep bigger is better. Half wave rectification is just as good for batery charging most

car battery chargers are configured this way .When your output is low  the voltage drop from a bridge can tip the scales . A batery will do the job of a cap nicely .

You can pulse charge with a large capacitor bank. In the mean time I'll bet your wanting to run some elctronics and I can see you gravitating to a UPS . The gel cells in a ups charge well with  a half wave rectifier .  

[RogerAS]

Excellent!

RogerAS