Project Hemisphere

And now to the present. After the dismal failure of my first attempt last summer, I rethought my approach. Instead of starting with one solid peice of wood, I'm starting with three peices of model grade plywood. Two for the fins and fin base, and one for the gears. I am currently very close to completing a prototype for the project. I have the materials that are listed in the components section as well as the tools needed. More pictures are to come very soon along with a log detailing the ineviatable construction woes I will face.

After my intial design phase, I was finally at a point where I felt that I could build it with some confidence. So over the summer of 2015, while at my Dad's house, I got a nice looking log, some tools, and started chipping away at it to make the turbine shape. The result was less that ideal. The product was heavy, fragile, and in no way fit for spinning at any rate of speed. So frustrated was I with that crappy looking hunk of wood that it got smashed to bits and procceded to be tossed in a late night campfire, never to be seen again.

Next log, the project as it stands now.

To recap events thus far: The idea had been thought of and I began thinking of construction of the turbine. For two years.

In that time I revised my design many times in my head. I had decided to have lots of features on the wind turbine. Neodynium magnets instead of bearings, a speed sensor to stop the turbine from going to fast in high winds, a way to stack multiple on top of one another to save space and maximize efficiency, a conversion kit to allow it to work as a hydro electric generator in rivers and streams, and many other exciting things. By the end of those two years however, I realized that I needed to stick to the most important design principle of all: Keep It Simple Stupid. So I tossed all those features out the window and went with a much simpler design that only included the main fin assembly, the fin cage, and the electric motor/generator.

Now onto building attempts in the next log.

As I found out about Hackaday so late, these first few build logs will be summerizing the time I've spent on this project from the first idea to now.

I first thought of the idea for this project while sitting in my 9th grade Geography class around 3 years ago. We were talking about alternative energy that day which got me thinking: There must be a better way to make a wind turbine. so I doodled ideas all over my notes and by the end of class came up with a crude idea. A hemisphere shape with multiple fins and a cover. It was a very simple design that I knew could be quite easily built, but out of what? Over the few weeks after that, I ran multiple ideas through my head to figure out what might work best. Things like wood carving, aluminium casting, sheet metal, and many others popped into my head, but all of them were too dangerous or too hard for me to do at the time. So I sontinue to think. For quite a long time actually. Close to 2 years to be exact. The next build log will discuss those two years of thinking.