Wind Turbine (slow progress)

[Boss]

Good Morning
It's the middle of the week already. If we didn't know better we would wonder where the time goes. I really had to push myself to get something done yesterday. Mostly self motivation worked,although every project I wanted to do was fraught with preliminary snags. I installed the new Ubuntu Natty Narwhal which runs the new Unity desktop environment. I had it already on my laptop,where I wasn't terrible impressed,but then the ultra–small size of my laptop irks me to begin with.

Anyway there have been write-ups on the new Unity desktop and I thought I'd give it a try on our living room PC. It took a good long while to download it,and another equal amount of time for the installation. After it was finished and had rebooted the stupid software waited to mention that the PC wasn't powerful enough to run the super duper desktop and it was going to revert to the previous software.

I knew the living-room PC didn't have a lot of memory, it was a freebee. We've got a few sticks memory lying around so I opened the PC,my goodness,it was full of dust bunnies. I hauled the PC out to the shop knowing that the last time I used the air blowsie tool it broke,again,and would need to be fixed. The hose in question is one of those cool plastic coils which hang from the ceiling. It was from Outland Tech, a business I owned many many years ago. Plastic doesn't last that long,and I thought I could take advantage of the years of storage I had dedicated to the hose. Wrong,this is the second time I broke it in as many months.

I had to dig around in piles and piles to find the hose we salvaged from the closing of Slim's saw mill. Digging and trying to remember where I saw something is half the battle when fixing things for me at least. I found the hose I was looking for,and installed it in place of the coiled hose,blew out the inside of the PC,the determined the memory sticks which also required digging to locate,didn't fit. Sigh,at least I fixed the air line and that project got me in the shop where I could concentrate on the wind turbine project.

 Coils-in-mold The coil set is lying on a bed of fiberglass cloth. this is a reinforcing for the 1/2 thick stator.


Coils-in-mold –I put a thick layer of Silicone II around the edges of the mold both to seal it from the polyester resin and to raise it up a 16th of an inch


Coils-in-mold-w-top –Also I had to make a new top piece for the mold. The first one was made from 3/4 inch plywood,which I thought would be more stable,but it turned out that an inherent warp got worse instead of better. There are small sections of rubber hose on the terminals to protect the treads from the resin.The rubber then fits through the top piece. Laying out the holes in the top according to where the terminals is critical to getting the top on and off easily during pouring and after setting. This sort of geometry made my brain smoke a bit,but I got it and didn't even mess up the super sanding and sealing job I did on the top piece. That made me happy.


Coils-in-mold-closeup –The Silicone II was pretty easy to work with,but I wasn't able to smooth it as you can see. I don't think it matters. It should compress when I clamp the top on,at least this is my hope. There is a little trade off here:Too much compression and the extra 16th inch I was aiming for in stator thickness will be lost or worse it won't compress evenly,which was the deciding factor for not using the 3/4 inch (warped) top piece.

Reinforced-tower-stub painted –While I was out there in the shop I've been meaning to paint the reinforced tower stub,as well as the magnet rotors. Again with the digging. I could not locate the red paint,nor the tan paint to match the rest of the tower and turbine. I did find a can of white,which the top two inches of were hard. I managed to dig through the top of the solid paint and get enough to do these three parts.


Reinforced-tower-stub painted –someday,I hope we can get a modern welder. we did this welding with a very old crackle box welder. I know it looks like crap,but we believe it is solid,and now it is white.


Nell took my picture last night while I was showing off these projects,I hope I don't always look this demented. Regardless,the turbine is to the left of me,maybe you can see that first coat of white on the magnet stator. It was rusty. It cleaned up well with a wire-wheel on a drill. I had used that because I thought maybe I could avoid fixing the air hose for the pneumatic wire wheel,silly me

So there it is

[Boss]

I decided to pour the mold today

Stator mold test –On Tuesday I put everything together in a dry run in order to make sure I had it all figured out.

Test-stator-mold-closeup - beginning on the bottom,a layer of 3/4 inch plywood,then a layer of 7/16 inch OSB (oriented strand board) coated with Silicon II sealant the the new top piece:1/2 inch plywood,sanded sealed with white glue,sanded again,linseed oiled,and waxed. Then a couple of 2X4s to help the effectiveness of 6 "C"clamps which are squishing the coils flat inside the mold.


resin mix-setup Above is the filler we use in our resin. It is alumina hydrate,not exactly certain what that is,I'm told we could replace it with talcum power,if that means anything to you.

buddy-bike-mold –And of course the first one on any scene lately is our new best buddy,Buddy the devilish little puppy.


tower-top-stub-painted.- I hope I have the energy to put a second coat of paint on the tower top piece,if not white will be good. I wire brushed the brown section and linseed oiled it. That part can't be seen,it slides down inside the square tube of the actual tower. I was going to spray rubberized under-coat paint on this section,but with no weather hitting it I think the linseed oil will keep the rust away.

Anyway, I pulled the test setup apart added a lot more wax, mixed up a hot load of polyester resin and poured letting the chips fall where they may, so to speak

I'm certainly not attached to this mold, if it sticks I don't mind too much, obviously I'd rather it came free. My motto at this point is practice makes me better

[oztules]

Waiting is the worst.

If you don't care how perfect it looks, I found that just laying a garbage bag in the mould, placing the stator in/over it?, and then another one over the top of the stator after pouring means no sealing required, and it falls out of the mold, and can't stick to the lid..... (resin won't stick to the plastic)

The only down side is  crease marks (from the plastic garbage bag) in the stator fibreglass..... but you can't see that anyway once it is in the air.

At least you don't have to wonder if it will come out.

At least your still having fun with it.... the main thing.



.......oztules

[Boss]

Good Morning

Alrighty then, difficult as it was to get off the couch yesterday, after the extreme work day on the tower above Mora,  sometime around 4:00 PM I did so.  I may have jumped the gun,  but that's the price you pay sometimes for pushing through what every day life throws at you. First I attempted to use the last part of a gallon of polyester resin from the first stator we poured. Unfortunately it was lumpy, so I poured it back in the can and moved on to the new gallon. I racked my nap-addled brain to recall how much hardener we used last time so as not to repeat that blunder,  I re-read the directions. Yes, I read the directions. Then I reread them. I guess I really did want this to work.

Anyway, last time I supposed we didn't use anywhere near enough hardener because after 12 hours the resin wasn't set, and I picked the stator up to bring to Synergy Fest it began to leak out, whoops.  I figured that it was the extra alumina hydrate power which acts as a heat sink that threw the proportions off. This time I figured it in, well actually I didn't really measure anything.   I guesstimated the volume needed to fill the mold,  poured that much resin in a coffee can. Adding a little over half of the powder I had left,  yeah right another meaningless proportion, but hey it is what it is.  Using a paint mixing paddle on my drill I stirred it up for a couple minutes,  before adding the hardener.

The hardener directions suggest 1/4 ounce hardener to a quart of resin. Right there is half the problem. The hardener has a measuring cup, the resin does not.  I hadn't calculated the volume of the mold anyway, so I guessed. Once one guess is thrown in, a second shouldn't matter a whole heck of a lot.  Nevertheless, the question of how much hardener was biased by my previous mistake, so I doubled the amount, then gave it a few more drops for good measure. Those last few drops may have been over the top,  but I'll not know until I try,  right.

Last time the resin didn't harden even overnight, this time it was warming up immediately. Two part resins get hot when combined. So I call this a hot mix. Anyway, it was setting while I decided to open the mold and add one more coat of wax, because last time the resin stuck to the mold destroying it. The bottom line was the resin wasn't flowing well and did not penetrate the coils well,oh well, still it looks awesome and I am very happy I did it. I knew there might things that might go wrong,  but I was trying to put indecisiveness behind me.


Wind turbine stator in the rough –What I wound up with is by observation,a perfectly flat stator. I noticed that the mold was bending with the strain of six "C"clamps squishing the top to the bottom. I simply backed the clamp pressure off until the mold flattened. I see a marginal penetration of resin to the coils. I think I can repair that with a thin coat of polyester resin. Most likely I'll trim it up and try it out on the wind turbine to see what type of output I get,before calling this stator a success. In the above image you are seeing the bottom of the stator. Obviously,the reason it popped right out of the mold is the resin didn't penetrate the lower layer of fiberglass. 

Other side of wind turbine stator in the rough - This is the top. I applied the top piece of fiberglass after pouring the resin. It was setting because of the extra hardener I added. Right,that stuff really works. If practice makes perfect, then after a couple more stators I ought to have this process figured out,well, better figured.

All in all,I am delighted with the results. Just the fact that I got this pour done pleases me. Certainly there will be consequences to not getting the resin to penetrate the coils. The alumina hydrate along with the resin act as cooling agents. Making the stator is a complex process, with quite a few variables. I'm looking forward to the next one.

With renewed hope,
 Brian Rodgers