19 June 2006

19/6/2006

Dear Dennis,

Thanks for offering to put the brunette up while on her course, you are tremendously generous and I have a warm glow because of it. I mentioned your generosity to the brunette and she was quite blown away. It would be quite an occasion to meet after all these many years of ridicules @mail to-ing and fro-ing. She is still working on details and which course is the one for her – we’ll let you know if and when, some time before she knocks your door. Thank you.



I have attached a quadruplet of photo’s of my wind generator turbines currently in development.

Mk1 is residing on the bathroom roof and is a fixed direction, triple blade applied to a 24v motor being used wired in reverse to generate small amounts of electricity and has problems because the gearbox I used to get the motor to turn faster than the wind, takes too much power to turn although in a strong northerly it fairly buzzes.



Mk2 is a development blade system which won’t need a vane type thing to turn it into the wind as it will always spin in the right direction no matter where the wind comes from. It is effectively two halves of a drain-pipe.



Mk3 is the Venetian blind turbine. It turns into the wind, has six blades, uses a properly wound generator (coil moves around fixed armature and it can either store electricity in an on-board storage capacitor or send it directly into the kitchen for charging rechargeable AA / AAA batteries. I have deformed the blades forward to stop it clattering on the pole. In wind and when turning, the blades flatten out but never (so far) enough to strike the pole. The blades are approx 10” long and the pole is attached via two varnished noggins of seasoned lelandii, to the house wall thereby lifting the turbine to about 30’.



Charlie “accidentally” managed to hit the vane with his footerball this evening and shatter the vane blade so it has been temporarily replaced with a slightly smaller version. Quite how he managed to hit it 30 foot up on a thin pole I don’t know but he came in and apologised so I thanked him and told him I was impressed with his footerballing skills and accuracy.



I have to “sign-on” tomorrow so I’ll be practising my deep breathing and sea