Windmill's in Action!

This is the final stage of our windmill project. It was only supposed to last for one day, but it has lasted about a week and a half, including a rainstorm. As of today, however, our windmill is out of commission. The problem is that the windmill actually screwed itself into the screw pivots. I guess that wasn't the smartest idea on our part. And it also fell out of the frame, but the good news is that it survived the fall. Though it's dead now, it is one tough, dead windmill. Oh well, it did what it had to. Enjoy our pictures and videos.

Building our creation

Here are a few pictures of our construction.









Besides wooden dowels, our windmill uses sheet metal blades and two brightly colored hula-hoops as a base. It is held up by a rickety frame and it spins on two screws, one on the bottom as a pivot point and one at the top for support.



The DC motor is attached to the frame so that any difficulties that the windmill itself will have wont be a problem. The motor is spun by a belt that's attached to the center dowel.

Almost there...

So we're chuggin along... I'm pretty sure we have all of the parts, it's just a matter of finishing the construction. For instance, we're going to have a more sturdy center connecting the two circles instead of just having a single wooden dowel. Not only that, but that helps the problem of needing to attach the circles to the centre dowel. We've made the frame and the circles and the blades, and we're working on the motor. with any luck it'll be done by tomorrow (well, it sort of has to...) and it'll be up and generating electricity by friday!

Picture and a Movie (with popcorn?)

Here is a picture:
And here's a video:

Prototype done!

In old news, the prototype was finished quite some time ago, but you know that. Any old how, the construction of the finished model will begin once we attain the following:
-Sheet metal for making the blades (we'll need 3, but I believe we intend on making 6)
-More plexiglass to construct the circular pieces to hold the blades
-A frame

In the post following this one, Ethan has curteously provided a video of the prototype in action with some j-pop in the background (thanks, Raekle).

3D Model Design

Here is a 3D model of our Wind Turbine:


We're probably going to have more blades than 3, but this is the first draft.

Keep on truckin'

So our original plan to deconstruct a VCR and extract the motor has... uh... failed but only slightly. after a greuling doubel period of trying to get the metal thing off of the motor, we haven't really reached any conclusions; we're still trying to figure out how we can possibly incorporate this into our final model. We're still throwing around ideas for the prototype... we've decided on regular plastic (or wood) fanblades for the final deal... although the question of horizontal blades versus vertical is still sort of more or less being debated. the math equations are in the works, and jill has designed prototype blades out of stiff gold-ish material just to, uh, get the "curvature" of the blade to make it more real.

that's where we are -- updates soon!