Introduction: Diy Wind Turbine
This is my simple diy wind turbine, it is 16ft off the ground, has three foot blades for a total diameter of about 5ft and the generator is a simple permanent magnet motor out of a treadmill. The blades were originally 4ft long for a 7ft diameter and spun in the slightest but they also hit the pole in the slightest breeze and near self destructed :(. So after watching many videos on how to stiffen windmill blades I came across the pallet banding idea, basically all you do is rivet thin strips of steel on to the trailing edge of the blades. I already had steel pallet banding but you can use aluminum flashing from a hardware store. I put my rivets 2in apart for a total of 16 rivets per blade, after I finished they were alot stiffer but not quite stiff enough so I cut them down to 3ft. That sums up the blades so onto the tail, I just hose clamped the generator and an old office chair swivel too one end of a piece of strapping and slotted and slid in the plywood fin on the other end. The office chair swivel fits perfectly into a piece of pipe which fits into the tower. The tower is a 16ft piece of steel pipe concreted into the ground 3ft with no guy wires to mow around. The last thing I did was mount my multimeter to the pole then cut the test leads off and wired the multimeter directly to the output wire from the generator, so I could monitor the output voltage. The kind of pipe I used was 4in pvc sewer pipe cut into thirds rather than quarters for an bigger wind catching surface. Thanks for looking!! Hope this helps you with your wind turbine project!!
