Building the Stator

The first thing to do is build a mold for casting the vinyl ester resin stator. We used 5/16" thick plywood. Louie Plagge and I asked the shop foreman at Luna Community College if we could use the school’s band saw to cut out the disks, so that worked out well. We started this during the Winter of 2007, and soon realized we needed our own place to work. Progress came to a halt on the wind turbine from Spring 2008 through Winter of 2009 while we built a workshop.

Spacing of the coils is pretty important, before we screwed the plywood mold together we marked out the lines you see in the above image.

I don’t remember what we used the calipers for, as I said this was over a year ago, something to do with the spacing of the coils I suppose.

In the above image the coils are spaced evenly around the mold. Once we had them where we wanted them duct tape is employed to hold the coils for the next step. Super Glue is used along with small strips of fiberglass cloth to permanently tie the coils in position. Once the fiberglass is glued down the duct tape is removed.

I need to find some pictures of us mixing the vinyl ester resin, that was fun, but we did it on the kitchen table and more than a few things went terribly wrong do to that fact.

Above the resin is poured into the fully waxed and greased mold. Apparently, vinyl ester resin sticks to everything, even grease and wax, unbeknown to us at the time.

It turned out that the fact that we couldn’t get the mold apart because of the super adherence ability of vinyl ester resin, but we also didn’t add enough hardener to the fiber glass mix either. I went through the entire year thinking that this first step we took in building our first at home wind turbine had been a total clusterfuck. After I picked up the mold to take to the local Synergy fest the next morning I noticed resin pouring out of the mold. Had I not been in a hurry and set the mold back down flat and put the clamps back in place maybe the project wouldn’t have seemed like such a failure. Indeed I threw the mold with the botched stator still in it out in the yard and procedded to build the new workshop. OMG what a projectr that turned out to be. W3e have the renewable energy workshop project documented on this site if you want to see how that went.

So like I said, about a year later I was getting all the wind turbine tools and suipplies together in the new woirkshop when I came across the mold with the stator still in it thrown down in the yard disrespectfully.

We destroyed the mold taking the stator out, truthfully I don’t know whay I didn’t think of this before, except we were quite busy building the shop.

In the above image the wavy edge along the right side is where the unhardened vinyl ester resin had poured out when I tipped the mold up on its edge.

We added duct tape around the edge to hold a little resin in.

A little closer look at the problem stator, The important thing is that the stator is uniform thickness, becuse the magnet rotors need to ride very close to the coils for efficient electrical generation.

With maintaining thickness in mind we use "C" clamps to squeeze the loose coils together as much as possible , after the resin is allowed to flow down into the spaces where it drained out of last year.

Another look at the staror recasting from a different angle.

The crazy cool thing is that this quick little fix worked like a dream.

Let me dig up the next series of pictures in the stators creation, demolition and subsequent resurection.

stator getting coat of resin

take a picture with one hand, while brushing on quick hardening vinyl ester resin, I guess I am ambidextrous

 

When I get home from work tonight or tomorrow I’ll take some more pictures of the stator, yeah man it looks real perty with the clear coat of resin.

To be continued…

Brian 03/02/2009