Wind energy - Wooden blades

Wood might be a pretty good substance to make some turbine blades from.

Unlike me, it's strong, light, flexible, and easy to work with.

It can also be shaped with a few tools that I already own. I also have a bit of experience with shaping wood from an earlier "thing" from my 120 things in 20 years.

Pictured here is a wooden lure body from a previous post on getting the most out of your printer by making hand made fishing lures with it. It even has the wing shape that I'll need as the profile for my turbine blade.

But enough self promotion...

By stacking a few different bits of wood together, it should be possible to give a turbine blade shape a bit of a head start.

We want an angled up, thicker wing shape in the centre, and a thinner, flatter wing shape at the tip.

Because the middle bit is moving slower that the tip, we need a bi-plane wing in the middle, and a jet wing at the tip, and everything else in between.

Then we should be able to cut away the bits that don't look like a turbine blade, giving us a nice curve that looks a bit like a propeller. 











And then shape the blade into that progressively thinner and flatter wing shape.

If we start by making cuts that join the dots so we cut from "A" to "B", we should get the angles roughly correct.

Then it should be a simple matter to round off the front edge (thick green smudge) in such a way as to make the front round, and the thickest point of the turbine 1/3 back from the front. So a line running the length of the blade running through point "C" would be the thickest bit.



With the guide points created by the corners made by the different heights of wood, there might even be a chance that I can make a second blade that looks a bit like the first. It needs to be very close to exact, so I might need a little luck, or some brand new skills.

That's the theory. I'll give it a go, and see what happens.

Handmade fishing lures - Wood carving

Making fishing lures is really just me getting a foothold into being able to make stuff in general. I want to be able to make whatever I want, out of whatever material I want. Making hand made fishing lures, will introduce me to some technology that should prove useful to a stack of other things I might want to do. Things like working with plastics, wood, wire, an paint. 

Finished with sandpaper

My ultimate goal that I would hope to pick up from this would be the ability to be able to make a copy of a door knob, or a light switch surround, or a bracket to hold a bottle of fish feed. Basically I want to learn how to make stuff, and to foster a mindset that allows me to think that perhaps "I could make that". There is nothing so conducive to failure, or numbing of mind, as the perception that what you attempt cannot be achieved. By learning some methods that aid in the basic manipulation of some basic materials, it becomes apparent that all that complicated manufactured stuff in the world is really just made up of lots of simple bits from suppliers that just happened to put up the lowest price during the tender process.

This will be my first attempt at making something that looks like something that has been bought. Another reason I want to do this is because I tend not to care so much about making things look good, and I tend not to want to spend the time making things look good. So I guess my goal here is to learn patience as much as anything. I sure hope learning patience doesn't take too long. And anyway, I'm not sure if the fish will care if my lure looks good.

I've been studying a lot and reading everything I can find on the subject. I've also had an idea or two, and have a feeling there might be a few holes to fill with innovation in this lure making racket.

Firstly it seems it's pretty easy to carve a lure out of wood. Even people who claim to have no great carving ability seem to be able to do it.

I can't carve either, so I to shall be good at this!

I started with what I think is a silver birch tree.

Its way too big for a lure so some of it will have to go.

I cut most of the tree away and kept just this more manageable section of around 150mm in length.

The next step was to clean it up a bit and start to make it look less like a tree and more like a lure.

I thought I'd leave some waste wood as a handle to make it easier to hold, so as not to cut of my fingers.

It almost looks a bit like it could one day resemble a lure.

Thats about as close as I'm going to get with the knife I think.

And thats about as much as I can do with the file.

I cut the waste wood handle off, and cleaned up the cut with the file. Then I sanded the entire thing to smooth as seen in the picture at the top of this post.

I think it worked quite well. And according to the photo timestamps it took around an hour. I think I can get that down to a few minutes by just using a grinder to do the whole thing. 

It's not a lure yet but at least I know this bit is easy enough to do.