Building a 1kW Wind Turbine For Under £100 - Part 1 - The Rotor

[Music] hi okay so the aim is to build a wind turbine of at least one kilowatt hour for less than 100 pounds and i want to build a turbine that hopefully will do more but at least that uh last few years and stick it on my roof and test it so that's what i'm going to do now for less than 100 pounds obviously quite a lot of it is going to be salvaged and collected from various places if i buy something i'll include that and i'll include the cost of the magnets not the coils because i plan on using microwave oven coils so i don't think i ought to be including those but certainly anything i spend i'm going to include anything i find and use i'm not going to include because it's basically just scrap and i want to take that scrap and turn it into a very usable wind turbine that will generate some serious power and that's the challenge i've kind of set myself so let's get on with it in the previous videos what we've been doing is a um horizontal or vertical axle wind turbine now the way we've been making them with the magnets on the outside of the rim there to my mind has given really impressive results the last one we made obviously was made from a cable drum and to be honest it was scrap wood and it was nailed and glued together so it wobbled like crazy but even despite that we got a good result out of it and i guess what that immediately tells me is make a better version one that's more stable one the stronger ones will last longer something like that the traditional way that people make blades or wind turbines on the youtube in the do it yourself is with a bit of pipe now a bit of pie patch is a bit of a pain to handle because it's quite springy however i came across this stuff this is rain water gutter that is actually the same size as the bit of pipe so that bit of pipe usually is 110. this is 112 actually so it's pretty much the same size but it has the added advantage of being flat so we can cut that and we can saw that into blade shapes no worries at all without the same problems that you tend to have when trying to cut a pipe up so this rainwater gutter is what i've chosen to use so same and pipe oddly enough it's actually the same price as well so clearly there's some type of kind of material cost sometimes machining cost because the same price for two of these as it is for one pipe so i've got several material and it is much more handleable so my first job is to make a whole load of blades out of this stuff just by chopping it in half slicing it down and finishing it off so let's do that i'm about to cut all those blades out from this pipe now we're people so whenever we do anything a whole lot of times actually your mind drifts a bit and you never get things exactly right even if you measure up and cut it's the way it is so the easiest thing to do is just make a very rough jig and that's all i've done what i've done is i've bolted a bit of wood onto the bench there so that when i shove my pipe up against that bit of wood because my saw's in the same place they're going to be the same length i can't do anything about it so i measured that up to the 60 centimeters actually and now every piece that i cut is going to be the same length now i'm using this thing and i should tell you i'm not being paid to advertise this this is an evolution saw that i use it's a basic chop saw cost me a 90 quid actually 95 quid something like that it slides back to a forward it's got a 45 tilt that way that way the table will tilt around to 45 degrees so nice basic saw does the job really well but it's the blade really this blade is called an evolution rage blade and it cuts through plastic wood aluminium steel it's uh i've used it for a ton of stuff and i find it a really useful sauce if you haven't got one of these you haven't got a chop saw you probably couldn't do much worse than that i suppose anyway all i have to do now is chop those out once you've done that and cut them all to size uh just mark them up i mean all i did was wrap a piece of string around there measure the string divide the string by three wrap it back around and transfer the marks join them up and i got myself three blades now obviously we need to cut that up i use this actually which is a stanley fat max reciprocating cutter it's something i have that i think is an awesome tool for this kind of job but i mean a handsaw or a knife angle grinder i've seen loads of ways of cutting these you basically need to cut it into three slats and that's what you get when you cut it into three slats and obviously we've got a bit of a rough edge which is right there so we need to clean that edge up now there is a tool called the cabinet scraper which is basically a bit of steel with the hook blade on it i actually tend to use these box cutter knife blades or trimming knife blades now they're a very sharp blade so you do need to remember you're working with a very sharp blade um actually this brings in mind a guy who um is posting a load of health and safety warnings at the moment and he actually gone a bit up aboard um he wanted me to warn you that paper could be dangerous and a lethal paper cut is not an interest not a nice thing and the last thing we made had rotating beds that could chop your head off i think the guy's growing a bit overboard eh but be careful because these are open blades and they are sharp try not to cut your own head off if possible so what i do with this thing is just hold it firmly between finger and thumb put it up against the edge that we're actually going to work with and use it like a cabinet scraper so at a slight angle and push away from yourself and you'll take off a trimming of all that swarf that we just had and it'll leave you with a very nice finish so you get a lovely finish to the edge of the blade and obviously you want to trim those up so that we get some nice blends like that now we've got to do exactly the same thing with these okay so when i've cut them all out what i do stack them up bind them together and then put them in the chop saw again on both edges to make sure that those edges are lined up that each one of these is exactly the same size as every other one now the reason for that is because with that plywood version that we made there were two main faults with it really one nothing was square and so everything was warped and twisting and that meant we couldn't keep the magnets close to the coil and two it was spread out of plywood so it's not going to be particularly weather resistant so you need to take a reasonable amount of care to get everything square so that when we put it together it isn't going to wobble the width of the one wood one did i'm using plastic of course this is um upvc meant for outside use it's got about a 25 year life span on it so they say and i've heard reports of 40 years so once you've cut that binding which is just a bit of electrical tape then you get all your slats nice and square and all the same size now we need to put these in a ring and the ring needs to be relatively large sort of two foot across and i was pondering what would be useful for that i was sitting on my chair thinking about this thing when it suddenly clicked on the bottom of the chair oh is this thing this thing actually is made to take a lot of weight it's made to take the weight of an average person so quite a few kilos that it'll take so i had some spare ones and i've collected two of those the plan here is to put a plastic ring around those this will be the support one at top one at the bottom so they're essentially like that spaced apart a ring on here that will be the carrier for both the blades and the magnets that will give me a weather resistant strong drum now as look would have it that central hole fits these perfectly i got these from a printer and so they're not costing me anything but i guess you could buy these with 10 pounds or so for the pair and you can bind bearings to any size you want this bearing is 47 millimeters the internal 25 millimeters to the internal external 47 internal 25 and it goes right in there like that and that awesome so that will line up and make me my bearing really rather nicely so the next task we've got to do now we've got most of our parts together because to make the drum we've got our support structure that's going to rotate we have bearings we still need a central axle we get our fin blades and we still need two large rings that can carry those hi so in a previous video we talked about this stuff which is an aluminium honeycomb structure that i salvaged from smart boards now it's an awesome material and i'm lucky to be able to find it and if you can find one of these things you should salvage it because it is just so awesome and it gives me a rigid structure where i can make those um ends of the drum that i need to make just by cutting out a piece and marking it up which is what i've done here so i've uh cut a piece 80x80 diagonal tag and i'll give me the center and i've used my compass to draw me an 80 centimeter diameter circle so this thing's going to be point eight of a meter across all i have to do to is take a jigsaw to it and then sand those edges to give me that and i'm going to make two bits like that which will be the end pieces of my drum once we got two of these massive circles the chair legs that we took off are going to fix on there now i'm not actually sure i'm going to put these on the outside so they look kind of spicy or on the inside so that they're kind of hidden but we bolt those through and that remember takes the bearing which drops straight in there now here's one that i've done all bolted up and i'm wondering if that kind of arrangement would be nice because we dropped the bearings in drill hole through here then we put the spacer pipe in there we'll get a very stable drum and obviously once we've done that these blades will actually slide into that drum like that so like i say i'm not 100 sure if they'll be on the outside like that either side or on the inside where they fit together like that i kind of like both and i think i'll play with both and see which ones i like but my next task obviously is to saw these off and get them bolted down okay so having cut out those massive discs and bolted on my chair legs what i've got is two massive wheels so obviously what i need to do now is attach these blades to them so i'm going to attach the blades actually just by gluing the blades on now i don't know if that's going to be the best way or not to be honest but i'm going to glue the blades on and we'll see how firm it is if it's firm enough brilliant if it's not firm enough then i'm probably going to put rods in between these here to run upright and tighten the whole thing down but let's see let's put the blades on and we'll see how strong it is okay so i was going to put the blades in but actually i thought i'd point out a few more things to you clearly what i've done is i've put the basic drum here with an axle on it and on this bench if i give that a little spin i mean that's actually really beautifully balanced hey so i've seen what kind of wobble i have on this side by basically sticking a pen on the bench and then you can judge where that wheel is going in and out as it goes past the pen if it's too low it'll hit the pen and then rise off and hit the pen and so on so you can actually mark where it's out of true i've got about half a millimeter out of true and for something like this which is you know blackboard and table legs half a millimeter that is just awesome actually now i found a bit of 50 ml steel pipe here that i buried into the table legs so that it gives it good strong support and keeps those legs out because remember this is where all the forces and then obviously they split onto the discs here and the blades are going to go in the disc now this is coated with a plastic coating and the blades will glue on there with super glue and as you can see by these marks i was thinking of doing that but then i changed my mind because they say even if i said so myself this is beautifully made so i want to make it really strong so what i've decided to do is i've cut off some little sections of pipe here and i'm gluing the pipe all the way around what i'll do is drill into the pipe once they're all in place and pour resin in there the resin will obviously go into that little section under here remember this is a honeycomb and fill the pipe up a little bit so that will make a strong and permanent fixing where i can put the blades onto here because super glue bonds to this upvc which is what this is and what this is very very strongly remember it's actually stronger than the original material so by time i've made those pipe sections there then the blades will actually fit in rather nicely into the pipe sections and i can glue the blades onto the pipe sections and have confidence that the wind won't actually just snap them off because this layer of plastic actually turned out to be relatively weak which was disappointing but once i get those pipes done then we're going to have a beautiful fixing there that the wind is going to be able to snap those off so i've got the drum made i've got it balanced obviously it's a lovely axle remember the drum turns the axle is fixed as a lovely axle we're making the blade fittings here out of these pipes which is what we're going to do and then we're going to fit the blades once those pipes are done just by gluing them onto the pipes so now all the pegs are on all i've got to do is put a bit of super glue on a peg make sure it's the right peg and then put that on at roughly 36 degrees and when that's dry just go around the whole lot doing exactly the same thing so there it is with the blades attached actually i'm quite pleased if i get this little spin those bearings are so good that's just going to spin for ages actually so really nicely freely spinning and i'm sure you can see how level it is like i said i've tested this and we're at half a millimeter out that's a bit awesome um so far i've actually spent uh two times four ninety five whatever that is eighteen seventeen pounds ninety uh no seven pounds ninety sorry on it so far and um that's where we are now the bulk of this is it's done all we really need to do with this remember with these designs is stick on the magnets and put the coils underneath and yes it's going to need a support structure but anyway that's that part done on with the next bit

Channel: Robert Murray-Smith

Views: 501,545

Keywords: DIY, HAWT, VAWT, wind, turbine, generator, power, robert, fwg, energy, system, generation, d-i-y, murray-smith, stem, steam, off grid, how to, make, build, home, made, built, engineering, design, alternative, disruptive, technology, dt

Id: HkkS_dYieeI

Length: 15min 28sec (928 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 02 2020