New blades for John's 17ft machine

[Halfcrazy]

Well today was a happy day my neighbor John took delivery of his new blades from Royal Wind and Solar. The set we carved had a bit of clearance issues with the tower  and we have learned a lot about blade rotation (CCW vs CW) with the turbine offset to the right of the tower. I will post a picture of them here freshly drenched in epoxy soon to be sanded and painted. With any luck this machine will soon be testing the limits of a pair of Classics again soon.

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[keyturbocars]

Very nice!

[kitestrings]

Ryan,

We'd be interested to hear of your observations on the rotational direction vs. off-set & furling.  On OP there's been some discussion regarding progression and/or seeking forces affecting furling.  I don't recall anything conclusive, but experience counts for a lot.

Our Sencenbaugh is CW rotaion with right-hand offset as I recall, but it is also geared ~6:1 so the rotor speed is low compared to most axials.

~kitestrings

[Halfcrazy]

A little late but.

We originally had the turbine offset 13 inches to the right of the tower with CW rotation on the blades. The machine never furled we have seen 9-10kw out of it actually kind of scary. The other side affect of this set up is when the turbine turns back into the wind the gyroscopic forces tend to bow the blades back towards the tower. We had 22-24 inches of clearance on the blade tips we had built in a good bit of upward tilt into the spindle.

Now it is my understanding that we messed up on 2 counts here. First is rotation versus offset side of the tower for an upwind turbine offset to the right of the tower blades should turn CCW this will allow furling to work as designed as well as push he blade tips into the wind away from the tower. For turbines offset to the left of the tower the blades should turn CW.

The second mistake we made was to much offset I am told you should have the length of a single blade in feet simply changed to inches IE an 8ft blade should have 8 inches of offset. We have 13 inches trying to be safe. Well now we have a very tame 3kw machine it furls right up nicely at about 18mph. So we will be letting it down and taking it back to about 8-9 inches of offset very soon this will hopefully give us a very honest 5 kw machine capable of say 7-8kw in good wind?

Wind is sure a lot of fun I think my neighbor is going to try to build a down wind home brew machine just to see if he can? I am currently working on my 17ft machine and a new tower I have hopes of running a lot of electric heat next winter . I currently use about 4-5 cord of wood a year to heat my house and DHW so this summers porjects where to be a very large solar hot water system to do all my DHW and hopefully a good portion of my space heating when the sun is out. The turbine should really help fill in the cold windy days running lots of electric heat. My 10ft machine usually gave me more than I wanted so I am really excited about a 17ft Machine. I will probably use my 10ft machine for parts to go on my lister diesel to charge through a Classic when I run it?

[keyturbocars]

Sounds like some fun projects.