This was our second year putting on a 'homebrew windturbine workshop' at the Sustainable Living Fair in Ft Collins, Colorado where we involve folks in building a wind turbine from scratch. We did this last year and it was great fun so we decided to go again this year. There is a page about last year here.
Our first year there we ran a vendors booth, sold some books and magnets and displayed one of the 10' diameter wind turbines that we built lastin 2002. DanF made an excellent page about about that one too.
The Fair is a fun, 2 day event with about 300 booths, workshops, live music... good beer, good food etc. It's very well organized and runs smoothly. In the past it was located in down town Ft Collins, this year was much more fun - it was in a shaded field (lots of big trees) next door to New Belgium Brewing Co, out of town a bit. To follow here on this page are a bunch of pictures of the fair itself, and some details about the machine we built. This year before the fair I agreed to donate our work to the 'silent auction' (the proceeds go to support next years fair). DanF made up a nice flyer explaining a bit about the machine, and the fact that it would be built by 'students' who'd never done it before, it may be rough - it may or may not get finished. Kind of fun!
It was fairly busy all weekend. Pictured above is one of the vendors areas. Lots of stuff about solar energy, conservation.. organic foods, bee keeping etc. Lots of interesting booths, though we didn't have a great deal of time to spend at them, our workshop was busy.
Victor was there from Aerofire Wind Power. We're quite lucky to have an such an expert in our area. He brought a Bergey XL.1 machine and a mock up of a huge Bergey EXCEL 10KW machine w/22' diameter blades.
The fair was located just out of town in a beautiful grassy field with big trees just south of New Belgium Brewing.
Just near our booth was the 'kids corner' where they had activities for children... games, stilts - and a solar powered bubble blowing tower which made bubbles all weekend.
I'm not quite sure what was going on in the 'zen corner'... they were making a garden, and had a few tents. Beer was not allowed there.
This fellow from EcoBuilders put on a very popular workshop all weekend where they built a straw bale shed. I wish I'd had more time to spend there, he was a really fun speaker and his portfolio of work was very impressive. Checkout their website!: http://ecobuilders.com/
Between the beer garden, and the stage (and near the food) they had all these hammocks and strawbales setup for 'lounging'. Great music at the stage and interesting guest speakers. We didn't have much time for lounging though... but it looked fun!
Erik from Dangerouslaboratories.org came by to visit us.. it was truly a pleasure to meet him! His website has been one of our favorites for years. Check it out! Lots of fun stuff there about radioactivity, high voltage - steam - jet propulsion, truly one of the great websites of all time.
This is one of the 4 tables at our workshop. While the main focus of our workshop was to build a wind turbine, we did sell 'Windpower Workshop' by Hugh Piggott, and also his latest wind turbine plans. They were quite popular. We also showed off one of the older wind turbines we'd built using Volvo parts, although the machine we were building was a bit cleaner - we used parts that we'd had fabricated for a lighter weight, nicer looking machine. I did all the metal and paint work at home before we came, but it was our goal to do everything else in two days and finish the machine. The workshop was divided into 4 2.5 hour sessions. I encouraged folks to start early and stay late though... 10 hours isn't really that much time and we really didn't need 3 hour lunch breaks. So we started out with nice laminated cedar boards provided by our freind/neighbor Scott (who makes real nice blades) and finished metal work. Work to do over the weekend included: Carving blades, winding coils and wiring them up, gluing magnets on the magnet rotors, cuting up fiberglass cloth and casting the stator and the magnet rotors, cutting out allthread, cutting out blade hubs and the tail from plywood, and then finishing all the wooden parts and assembling all the parts. So, I would say we did about 75% of the work of building a wind turbine here over two days. The list of tools I had to bring was fairly daunting. George came and helped out, as did DanF. Generally it took one person to keep the 'students' busy, and two people to answer questions from the crowd of folks that was surrounding the workshop all weekend. Lots of fun - though quite tiring.
Here Kevin is just starting out carving blades with a hand plane, and a drawknife. Kevin came on Saturday morning and stuck with us till Sunday afternoon - he had to leave a bit before we finished. He'd driven a long ways from Nebraska to help out so that he could hopefully get his college students to build one like it.
David (on the left) was with us all day Saturday. He wound all the coils. Pictured above David and Kit (on the right) are cutting the leads off the coils and removing the insulation. Kit was great, he was with us the whole time till Sunday till almost 8PM (he helped load the truck and everything). He flew all the way out from California just for the workshop. This is a 48V machine, we wound the coils with 140 turns of #16 gage wire. There are 9 coils in the stator, 3 in series per phase and the phases will be wired in Star.
Pictured above David and Kevin are wiring up the stator in preparation for casting.
Towards the end of the day on Saturday we were preparing to cast the magnet rotors and the stator. I try to do this part at the end of the day, the resin smells bad, we try to be as non-offensive as possible. Another part of being 'non offensive' at a fair like this involves using mostly hand tools and avoiding loud power tools. Almost all the work on the blades was done with hand tools except for a bit of sanding at the end where we used an orbital sander.
Casting the resin was a bit interesting. The resin went off way too fast - it was getting hard after 10 min, before we even had the lid on the mould! We wound up franticly pulling chunks of hard resin off the top of the stator and mixing up a new batch real fast - pouring it on the top and quickly slamming/clamping the lid down. We were fairly sure it would not work out - or at he very least be quite ugly. As it turned out - it was fine. Save a couple of holes (which we filled with new resin the next day) it was actually quite nice - in fact it may be one of the nicest stators we've ever made with regard to appearance - it had almost no air bubbles.
Here Kevin has clamped the stator to the metal framework and is drilling through the mounting brackets into it.
Kit uses a hack saw to cut through stainless steel allthread. We need 4 studs 6.5" long to hold the alternator and blades together, and 3 studs 4" long to mount the stator.
Here Kit, 'Whiskers' and Kevin are assembling the alternator. It went together fairly nicely, it looked nice and worked well.
'Whiskers' joined us for the whole day on Sunday. He'd studied the plans we published in Back Home magazine so he had an idea what was going on. He also stayed till the very end and helped load up the truck/clean etc...(thankyou!!!). He was a talented woodworker and really took over blade carving, doing very nice work himself and doing a great job of instruction other folks. Because of his help... the blades came out just about perfectly.
Dianne Joined us for the last session on Sunday. She, Kit, and Whiskers and his wife Michelle worked on finishing the blades, cutting out the tail - and assembling the machine.
We have to cut into the back hub, and through the blades (but not through the front blade hub) with a 2.5" holesaw so that the blades can fit over the wheel hub on the front of the alternator, which sticks out about 1.5".
There she is all finished up with some of the folks who helped to build it. The machine came out very nicely.
Another picture of the finished product. I was quite happy that we finished it, and even more happy with the overall quality of the work - it was almost flawless in my opinion. As I said before, we had donated this project to the silent auction. It wound up selling for $1000 which made us all happy! After this we cleaned up, loaded the truck, and went to the 'Swing Station' in Laporte for a beer and some pizza. Then we drove home and went to bed. Fun weekend! Thanks so much to Kelly and Tony for making this fair happen! Thanks to David, Kevin, Kit, Whiskers, Dianne, Steve and Scott for building such a nice machine - it was fun to meet you all. Thanks to DanF and George for coming to town and helping with the workshop.
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©2004 by OTHERPOWER
