Wind energy - Carving wooden blades 2

Sometimes you just have to wait until glue dries before you can progress with your wind turbine construction. This has been one of those times, and this post follows on from the post called "Wind energy - Carving wooden blades".

After undoing all the clamps, I still felt a bit like I had no idea what I was doing. This was partly due to knot getting enough sleep, and partly due simply to the fact that I really don't have any idea what I'm doing.

I'm still not certain I've got the shape correct.

But that's ok. I'll learn some stuff anyway.

Just don't copy this until you see if it works out.

The aim here is to try to make the blade have a steeply angled, thick wing shape at the slow centre, tapering out to a thin, slightly angled wing shape at the faster moving tip.

The cuts I'm making go to approximately 6mm from the edge to around 6mm from the other edge

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

I used a coping saw to make these cuts. A coping saw is the only saw I ever enjoy using. They have rotatable blades so you can cut sideways, and because the blades are very thin, you can cut circles etc. They are the only saw that seems to cut anything. It might be that, because the blades are so thin, you break them all the time. This means your blade is always brand new. Buy a coping saw if you need a small saw. They are very cheap, and are great to work with.

It took around 10 minutes to make the cuts.

Any of the regular readers (hi regular readers) might have come to realise that perhaps I don't use rulers and things as much as I should. This may be one of those times.

If you look carefully, you can see a collection of random looking lines drawn on the wood. At least one of these lines is important. Perhaps two. 

This is the under side of the blade. Actually I think this might be the front. This is my problem. I cant tell. I'll cut and see. 

Hack away at the little bits of wood between the cuts. They break of in a very satisfying way. 

I used a chisel for a bit, then just hit them with the side of the chisel as if it were a hammer. 

Then I just used a hammer. 

Once again, I'm a little surprised.

It kind of looks a little bit like it might one day resemble a turbine blade. 

The wacky angled bit of wood in the foreground is just the top, smallest length of wood on the progressively more angled stack. 

The bit sticking out toward the back is the blade I just hacked into a rough shape.

Next up, let the filing begin.

This might take a while. It's not as smooth as it looks in the photo to the left.

I'm tempted to just use the angle grinder, but I thought I should do at least one side by hand to keep it to a basic set of tools.

If it takes too long I'll use the angle grinder for the other side, but this one will be by hand.



And using an angle grinder might set fire to my project anyway.

I used a bench grinder to carve my home made fishing lures in a previous "thing", and that got a little hot but worked quite well and was fast.

We shall see.