anyone have any aluminum extruded profile for testing/sale

[itsandbits]

Hi,
I'm trying to track down as many extruded aluminum shapes that are available on the market place today and available on the open market. I hope the moderators of this panel will help me with direction as to what can be posted here as far as profiles/chords/thickness/price per length/location. I know there is some out there but they are hard to track down. can we put them in this thread or can the moderator put them where they would like them? I know this is a diy site as most of them are but a reliable blade set would go a long ways towards streamlining the build process. If you utub Remkick you will see the efforts I have made to develope a wing and I would like to try some other extrusions out.
Ideas anyone or all
Moderator input required
Lloyd

[dnix71]

Rather than making a blade/wing from a single piece, why not make a composite wing with spars and a skin?  Those are stronger and lighter weight than a single extrusion.

Also, visit rain gutter installers. There are plenty here that extrude continuous gutter on site from rolled sheets. All you would need to do it change the extrusion mold to make a different shape.

[itsandbits]

I don't know if you did utub my wing making results but I have thought of the same concepts you put forward and would disagree with the results you got based on my real world work on my wing profile I have developed. I am discussing with an extrusion company right now the manufacture of this in an extrusion and would welcome the bid by a gutter forming company to on site manufacture these in an endless process. I am actually working with a local mfg. of endless gutters to do this but any input is great. I don't know why this posting got buried so deeply and in this strange; to me, place, but I think the input I was looking for will not get accomplished here which was to get a listing of all the profiles available in the world by anyone that would sell thier unit by the manufactured length and at what price from where.
Lloyd

[dnix71]

Another disadvantage of a single piece extrusion is fatigue fracturing with age. Unless you use some fairly exotic alloys a single piece of aluminum will crack and fail. A rain gutter doesn't spin and flex in the wind like a wing does.

Even carborn fibre laminates are brittle.

The stresses on a propeller are diverse. There are forces at the hub in the direction of motion and twisting forces along the blade under load. That's why most of the doit yourselfers here use wood.

Wood might be heavy but God made trees to stand in the wind all day.

[jvnn]

That's not extrusion, it's forming.
Extrusion uses rather heavy hydraulic presses, typically more than you would find in the back of a box truck.
But yes, you could form sheet into airfoil shapes, but it would be a thin skin and you'd need to put something inside to support it.
Also, forming like this can't do tapers along the length of the product. (if you are thinking about blades)

Also, visit rain gutter installers. There are plenty here that extrude continuous gutter on site from rolled sheets. All you would need to do it change the extrusion mold to make a different shape.

[SparWeb]

Airfoil extrusions can be found.
I can suggest to you www.thebackshed.com if you want to try extrusions as blades.
I must caution you, though, those guys don't give much consideration to the structural issues of assembling their blades and have ended up with many failures.
Failures of the kind that any engineer could forsee.
If you choose to use them, you cannot make the rotor as big as you may think you can from the projects posted on their forum, and you should not under build the attachment spar tube that goes up the middle of the blades.

In short: much less forgiving than wood.