Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Wind Turbine: The Two Hour Battle

 This is the thick metal sheet that fits inside the dome. The shape was created using a paper template and allows for the wings to be attached to the dome without interruption. The hole in the center of the metal was a pain to get to its current state. I first had to drill through the sheet using increasing bit sizes. This was time consuming due to a coat of something, I'm assuming plastic, on the surface of the sheet metal and the thickness of the sheet metal itself. Following the drilling, a jigsaw with a metal cutting blade was used to slowly cut away at the metal. The cut could not be made in one pass because of the tight curve of the circle. I had to chip away at the circle one cut at a time. This too slowed me down. As I moved along the circle, chipping away one piece at time, the cuts began to be more and more difficult to complete. I finally stopped with my circle being about half a centimeter smaller than needed. The only solution was to file out the circle to the correct size. The hole took a little over two hours to cut out, but it fits perctly around the pipe that is to be placed into it.
 Here is the hole cut through the bottom of the dome.
This is the final outcome of the day with the pipe containing the originally intended bend. 

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