We had a good/busy time over 4th of July weekend working towards raising Matts 15' wind turbine. Some details about it, and similar machines are
HERE. There is a page about making his blades
HERE.
Pictured above is the machine assembled on the tower. It's been sitting that way not for about a month.
Click Here to see a page about assembling the machine, and some small measures we took to strengthen it.
The blade was surprisingly not too badly out of balance. For balances, we cut bits of angle iron and bolted them to the hub in such a way that perhaps they'd help slightly to cool the stator. You can also see that we cut pieces of angle iron, and put them on both sides of the hub, with 1/2" bolts through them, tightly squeezing the hub/blade asssembly together. This should hopefully make it a bit stronger. Thankyou to Victor (5KW) for this suggestions!
Pictured above is the tower almost finished. It's a nice spot, on a ridge top where the lodgepole pines are fairly short. We had to cut about 40 trees to make room. The tower is 43' tall, made from 3" pipe. The top 10' is reinforced inside.. hopefully its rigid enough for the 15' machine. The idea for this machine is to furl early, so that should help. The base of the tower is 5' long and 4' wide, made of pipe, and the tower pivots (pipe over pipe). It's staked down. The Jin pole is also 3" pipe, 16' long. They guy wire mounts are of re-bar, epoxied into rock. One reason we chose this spot.. it's fairly flat (about as good as you'll find up here), and we had 4 nice spots for guy wire anchors in rock.
Here Matt, and a few neighbors (most of which have built wind turbines now) are assembling the machine on the end of the tower.
And there it is! It went up pretty smoothly. It was pretty still, and in all honesty - the performance kind of blew my mind. It's a 24 volt machine, and it was very quick to produce 15 amps in what seemed nearly still air. A couple times what seemed a fairly light wind came through, we saw well over 1000 watts. Only once I saw about 1500 watts, at which point it was just starting to furl. So far so good, we'll see if the blades and the tail stay on and hope the alternator doesn't melt! Time will tell...
Lots of fun anyhow.