This might sound silly but if I had one coil out of whack wouldnt that make the other one on that side out as well and totaly eat all of my output.
In a polyphase the separate phases are largely independent. (In a two-phase they'd be COMPLETELY independent, in a three-phase you can treat it as such.)
When you parallel windings and don't get it right, it's like shorting out a coil: When the rotor moves any generation creates enormous currents, which hold onto the magnetic field, resisting your motion, and dump the resulting energy into heating the wire. The lower the resistance of the wire the higer the currents, and with losses going down with the resistance and up with the square of the current the more the braking force. (Electrically braked motors, such as those on cutoff saws, work by shorting the motor windings while the rotor is still magnetized, doing this deliberately.)
Thought of an easier way to check for that: Take all the electric load off it and try turning it by hand. If it fights you (other than cogging, which alternately fights and helps) you have a shorted turn. Put a heavy pulley on it, give it a shove, and see if it keeps spinning for a while. A miswired parallel winding, or even a parallel winding of two coils that are off by a turn, will slow it down. (Also: If you didn't get your magnets mounted symmetrically, and if the windings are on separate poles, the paralleled coils won't be exactly in phase and you'll get some braking from that.
Another thing you can do: Chuck it in an electric drill, run it up to some constant speed, and check the voltage on the three phases of your wiring hookup, just before the rectifier. They should be the same, or very close. Any cheap meter with an AC volts scale will do. (If it fights the drill you've got a bum parallel hookup.)
It is possible I have totaly stuffed the phase thing up and might need to rectify each coil then put them in series or parallel to give either voltage or amps.
Putting them in series, THEN rectifying them, THEN putting them in parallel will eliminate the issue (at the cost of more diodes).
I can't scope the thing as I don't have one and wouldn't know what I was doing with it anyway LOL!!!
My first thought is to go bigger with prop that is faster as it seems slow to start and maybe just not catching eneogh wind.
Thanks for posting the picture of your prop.
It looks to me like the REAL problem is that your blades are too slanted and your tip speed ratio is way too low. So the genny doesn't move very fast and produces low voltage and little power. You need to change the slant of the blades so they're closer to flat to the wind. That trades lower force for higher speed, so if you're having startup problems form cogging you'll need a bigger prop.
You also need bigger blades to make up for the blades being flat rather than curved so that the section near the hub has a smaller slant to the wind than the section near the end. The farther out the blade, the faster it's moving. So the lower slope it needs to match the air's motion.
(If you use flat blades the outer parts are ending up being an air brake when the inner ones are still pulling power. As you pull power from the blades with the genny the blades slow down and the pull/drag region moves outward, until eventually even the tips are helping. It works OK but it's not as efficient as if the whole blade was working evenly. In addition to the non-trivial power loss you get a lot more drag, so you need stronger supports and bearings. But this is minor compared to speed-matching with the alternator.)
Another question is when you rewind one of these things do you just pull out existing wire and wind the new stuff back in. I would think if you did this you would try to go more phases.
I think so. (Haven't actually rewound motors since I was a kid and not sure I did it right then. Can somebody else comment?)
Three is the optimum for power/copper ratio and that's what the cutouts in the stator are designed for. Wind it the same way but thicken the turns and use fewer of them to fill the same space (i.e. same total cross-section of copper in each slot), and you get lower voltage, higher current, and the same power. To increase the power you need to move the magnets faster or make them stronger - and there's a limit to how strong you can make them before the core saturates and you can't get a stronger field through it.
If you want to change your wind you can lower the startup speed by increasing the number of poles and changing the coil layout to match. But that involves rearranging the magnets on the rotor as well. You end up with more turns in a given space (provided you've got the slot space for them) so you can get the same current and a higher voltage (and thus more power) from a given number of magnets.
