Wind energy - Carving wooden blades

Making the wooden turbine blades is proving to be more of a intellectual problem rather than a skill problem. At least so far.

I cut my 2400mm length of 42mm by 11mm pine into lengths I could stack as per the plan in the post called wooden blades. The longest section was cut to 1200mm, then 700mm, 350mm, and the last length was 150mm. I chose these numbers because of some vague image in my head of what it should look like.

I lined them up and drilled a centre hole to fit a bolt I had.

this way I can rotate the stack into position knowing that at least one point is lined up.








Next up was to glue them and line them up so that they were in a rotated stack. Each progressively shorter section was stacked on top of the others with enough rotation to line up the stacks edge with the new items half way point.








After doing this I started to question exactly why I was doing this. My plan had started to evaporate in my head.

I have design doubt.

I cant figure out which side I think is the front, and which way I think this thing will spin.


The only thing left to do was to attach as many clamps I could find and stop thinking about it until it's dry.

Watching glue drying is even less fun than watching paint dry, because you cant even see it.


I hate waiting.

I hate design doubt.

2 comments:

  1. That looks like a pretty clever design! I like the offset laminated pieces.

    Where you planing on sanding it down all the way, or using something like bondo to fill in the gaps a little bit?

    From what I see in photo #2, the blade as it sits, down would face into the wind and it would rotate counter clockwise from this view. Your bolt sticking up would go to the generator shaft.

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  2. This isn't my idea. I cant remember where I saw it, but I think it was on TV years ago, and was dealing with restoring WW2 Bi-plane props or something.

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