It's been a few weeks since I've posted. Nothing terribly exciting going on - we've been fairly busy making parts/building 'cookie cutter windmills' ;-) although I think we do keep making small improvements each day we work at it. Pictured above is a family of 'fly catchers' that moved into the addition on the shop for a few weeks this summer.
A couple weeks ago all these people came up from New Belgium Brewing and took lots of pictures - they may feature our 'operation' in one of their advertising campaigns. Pictured above they're taking pictures of my daughter Maya with her rooster 'Tyson'.
Maya with Tyson. Tyson is incredibly tame/nice to her - he always attacks me though.
There's a new set of 16' blades fit to the steel hubs.
Scotty showed up with some defective magnet rotors and what he thought might be a blown rectifier. The rectifier was fine. The magnet rotors we made over a year ago with polyester resin - the polyester had warped and seperated from the magnets/rotors and was rubbing a bit on the stator. This is off his 12V axial flux wind turbine we made last year. It had a 2 blade 11' dia wincharger blade and a wincharger airbrake on it (it doesn't furl). It's been good all this time and has almost never been shut down - the machine works incredibly well, but.. the polyester in the magnet rotors finally failed.
Fortunately the magnets were still fine. We took them all off, ground the surface of the rotors and then glued them back on. We banded them with stainless steel and recast the rotors with a mixture of vinyl ester, ATH and chopped fiberglass. Hopefully it holds up longer this time!
This is how we've been making stators lately - rather than running wires out we solder lugs (brass 1/4-20 screws) to the leads and cast them right into the stator. I've seen a few folks doing that here on fieldlines and I like it.
There's a finished 24V stator with lugs cast into it. We've made a few this way now and they come out nicely every time so far.
A week and a half ago Matt and Daphne thought a little road trip would be fun. Rather than crate it and pay to ship it they decided to deliver a 17' wind turbine to North Central Washington (about 1100 miles). We strapped the blades/tail to the roof and filled up the back of the volvo with the rest of the machine.
On their way they saw some other folks delivering big wind turbines.
This is the home for the 17' machine we made. I don't know what the wind turbine on the left is... I think maybe it's an older 'Hornet' but not sure. The one on the right is an 11' machine he bought from us off ebay almost 3 years ago - it's grid tied, the power house is right there in the picture.
Perhaps this will be the tower for the 17' machine. He evidently has several of these towers that were built for large fans that keep orchards from freezing. They're very strong and make nice free standing towers - although they are pretty short...
Lots of fun anyhow! Today we work on a 10' machine and we expect a fellow who lives nearby to come up and start work on his own 17' turbine.
