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