The Fun and Misery of Experimentation!

[Timothy Barker]

So, I've been messing around with the wind turbine again today! Crikey, will we ever get there? :-) The good news is that the new set-up of the balsa wood blades bolted onto the room cooler fan seems to be working well. The blades are spinning nicely in a light breeze. The whole contraption is now looking a little more engineered as I'm using the 'meccano' (TM)- like bits and pieces to attach the old stepper motor to the upturned castor wheel assembly (so that she spins) and these are also attached to the tail fin assembly. This again is made of balsa wood and bolted onto the assembly...This all means that the whole thing is more maintainable and easily comes apart for travelling. This is obviously important for us since we'd like to be able to travel with both the solar computer (SOL-1) and a functioning wind turbine.

The bad news is that the electrics don't seem to be working at present so we have this beautiful spinning wind turbine which does not produce electricty, yet! We're working on it! :-)

Actually this whole project is a huge experiment. It is going well, believe me. However, you shouldn't have to take my word for that. I intend producing the final version of our White Paper as soon as possible. This should explain in more detail what are intentions are. A newsletter will shortly follow hopefully which will describe where we are. Things are slowly coming together so I ask everyone to PLEASE be patient!

Cheers,

Tim.