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Wind Turbine Diary
28th January
Today was excellent because me and my dad took drove up to near Dundonnell on the West Coast and then walked the 5 or 6 miles out onto the peninsula called Scoraig, where since the early '70s there has been an "alternative" settlement (for wont of a better way to describe it!). The only access is by boat or along the path from the road end. There is no electricity supply, so it all has to come from the wind, or backup generators. This where Hugh Piggott, the author of my guidebook is from, and it is covered in home-made wind generators, so we though it would be good to do a bit of investigative walking...
The left picture shows the only land access to the village, where 90 people now live. The right shows a picture of a home-made turbine very similar (but with an older design) to the one I'm making, and the house that it powers. It was fascinating to see this place, in one of the most beautiful but sparsely populated part of the country living in a seemingly thriving community with no amenities... As you can see from the picture of the turbine, the guy lines that secure the mast are quite numerous and cover a large area. This totally rules out my parent's garden as a site for the finished turbine, but that's a problem to be dealt with when it arrives!
29th January
It's pretty cold, so no casting today. I am pretty impatient to get the stator cast because the coils are being a bit of a pain. So much so that I'm going to have to "thicken" mould by a few millimetres to accommodate the coils with a tight seal when the lid of the mould is clamped down. But after sorting out this problem, it is still too cold to cast the resin and David Stewart whose workshop it is is not around today and I need his expertise in this area... Maybe next week, but there's plenty other stuff to do. First of all I started to drill the holes in the steel disks on which the magnets will be mounted and cast. But after drilling out one hole through the hub (as pictured, the hub is for a trailer wheel) the drill refused to do it's job any more so I gave up on that. I'll need to get a better drill-bit during the week. On the right is the magnet positioning jig that I marked out and cut today. This piece of thin plywood will bolt onto the steel disks that you can see under the drill and hub, and the magnets will slide into each of the notches so that they can be super-glued down in the right places.
Next I tackled some more of the carving of the first blade, getting the back face to the right thickness all the way along and then slowly making the aerofoil shape of the back of the blade, the same shape as an aeroplane wing. It's pretty hard to get a picture of the progress on the blade, but you can see from the tip what is going right through it's length:
On the right to balance things up is another Scoraig picture from yesterday. Ironically, there wasn't even a whimper of wind, so not one of the hundreds of machines were turning! You can just about see three turbines in this picture, but you might hurt your eyes. All in all an excellent weekend! Will update next Sunday...
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