January 7, 2005

THE STORY SO FAR...
Windmill Construction

Well we did a ton of work on the windmill, but I had no time to update the blog, so this is the update. We left off with blade carving, and here are the blades.

 

 

So now we are going to cast the stator.. The stator holds the wire coils and is mounted on the windmill so that the two rotor blades are on either side of the stator like an Oreo cookie.

Here are the wire coils laid out

Tejal soldered all of the connections together and wrapped it all up nice, so then we prepared the mould by waxing it up with some car polish.

First a fiberglass sheet is laid at the bottom, and then casting resin is poured over the fiberglass sheet.

Then we laid the coils into the pool of resin.. Note the nice wiring job (thanks Tejal!)

Filling the mould up to the top with resin.. Note that this layer is opaque. This is because of the talcum powder that we used as resin filler.

After we filled the mould, we gave it some shakes to get rid of as many bubbles as possible. Next we laid another fiberglass sheet over the top. Then we popped the lid on, clamped it down, and put some weight on the mould. The weight in this case is a water lily container garden (heaviest thing around)

We waited a few days before taking the mould apart. First we pried the lid off.

As you can see, the stator is adhered to the mould, even with the wax.

After a little bit of negotiation with a hammer and a chisel, the stator came out of the mould

here we go.. the stator. It will need some cleaning up, but it's there.

 

Last: Blade Carving

Next: More casting... The Rotor