As usual, Monday was another productive/fun filled day up here. Nothing terribly new or exciting happened - but here are some of the pictures anyhow.
Our freind Adam came up which was a fun surprise. Adam was with on when we went to Hugh Piggott's Seminar on Guemes Island in 2003. Pictured above Adam and George are fitting the tail to the single rotor machine we're building for DanF.
So DanF's machine got finished. We got all the hardware in the blade hub, the tail fitted etc. I'm still a bit worried about heat in the stator on this one. I dont think it will be terribly efficient in high winds and it might overheat. We'll see - easy fix if it does. I'm curious to run it as it is for now and see what happens. It should furl quite early so that will help.
Here's a fun picture of DanF's wind turbine with mine, and dogs... in the background.
Scott brought up two 11' blade sets made from laminated cedar. Here he's oiling them and assembling the hub.
There are both new blade sets drying in the back of my truck.
DanF's wind turbine is going to go on a lattice tower that's right beside his house (about 10" from his wall). His place is a two story cabin. His lower roof is easy to get onto, I'm making a short ladder to make upper roof access easy. We'll be able to assemble the tower and machine from the top of his highest roof. With luck - if the weather is nice, that will be next Mondays project.
Here is the top of Dans Tower. Its a lattice tower. We cut the top off, and welded in brackets and stubs of 2.5" pipe. The very top of the tower will slide down into that so that we can lower it to roof top level, put the machine on, and then raise it up with a rope/pully about 10' above his roof top. The pipe that slides in here will be held up to its highest position by a pin, and there are set screws in the larger pipes so that we can tighten it down and hopefully it wont rattle too badly. After I took this picture we also welded a pully to the top of this assembly.
We got this cute little 2.5HP diesel from George at utterpower.com. While it might be easier to simply belt an alternator to it for battery charging.. it wouldn't be much fun! Were building a PMA for it. Hard to tell from the pictures, but the magnet rotor has a steel band welded around it. This runs at 1150 rpm and were a bit worried about magnets flying out. We're going to try to build a commutator for this alternator so that it can electric start. Should be a fun experiment. The engine is water cooled, so we'll tie it into Scotts nifty radiant floor heating system. At this time Scotts only power comes from a very small PV array, his Homebrew Hydro electric plant (which has run flawlessly since we installed it almost a year ago even through the coldest months), and his homebrew wind turbine (which is now an 11.5' diameter machine on a 50' tower works really well for him).
As usual the day ended with a very crowded shop, pizza - and lots of begging dogs. At one point there were 11 people visiting (my shop occupies half of a 10 X 50 mobile home) and about an equal number of dogs.. including a rather large newfoundland named Martha.
