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The wire arived last week and by dinner-time this evening we had the 1st phase of coils in their proper layout and connected together on what is to be the beginning of the mold for the stator. The plywood is for layout purposes and will eventually be used to cast the fiberglass epoxy around the coils. It will not be part of the machine. You can also just make out the other 6 completed coils in the shadow of the shelf.

Fig 1. The stator began by figuring the arc of travel the magnets will eventually make as part of the rotor and laying that out inside the outer diameter of the stator. This will allow me to place the center of each coil in the path of optimum magnetic flux.

Fig 1: 18" square plywood with 8", 12" and 15.5" Concentric Circles

 
Fig 2. Using a Table of Sides, Angles and Sides I was able to determine that Continue Reading »

There’s always someone who has it worse off than we do and Colorado Springs Rescue Mission has been serving the area’s poor and needy for over 13 years. Demonstrating the love of Christ while serving about 100 meals per sitting (2,500 each week), they are much more than a soup kitchen. They are working on long-term solutions to poverty with ”life skills” education, a residential recovery “New Life” program and an Emergency Resource Center for the working poor, families with children and homeless individuals.

This morning we started making a batch of Leigh’s apple pies to take. At about 8:30 the boys were getting all the dry ingredients together to make the upper and lower crusts while I was cutting up the butter (1/2 lb per pie) and Leigh was orchestrating .

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The other day one of my neighbors hooked me up with some industrial metal shelving for the garage. It was very generous of him and quite the score for me, but I ended up needing 80 – 100 machine screws to put it all together… nothing out of the ordinary, just some 1/4-20 flat-heads would do nicely, so off to Lowes I went.

They had them in those little drawers, but in Stainless Steel at 2 for $2.00 I was looking at $80 – $100 just for screws… not for this project. You know that finding someone half-way decent to help at these places is hit & miss and I can generally find what I want by myself, but one of the workers found some brass ones for me. I was still looking at $60 and didn’t want brass anyway. Off to Home Depot.

Home Depot also had them in brass for close to the same price as Lowes (I guess there’s a lot of boat builders here in land-locked Colorado) and then I found the ones I wanted, but in those stupid little plastic packages for 4 for $0.98 . That’s still $25 bucks and I guess I’m too ‘old school’ because it wasn’t so much the price anymore as it was that you can’t seem to get a box of zinc coated machine screws at a hardware store. I walked out thinking, “If they don’t have what I need, they might as well have nothing”, a comment I’d heard growing up, from my father to more than one salesperson as he’d walk out of a store . Continue Reading »

The Coil Winder is made from:

•  2 – 6″ dia plywood discs (one 1/2″ & one 1/4″ thick)
• 1 – 4″ dia 1/4″ plywood disc
• 1 – 5/16″ x 3″ bolt (with a hole drilled in it for the nail
• 1 – 5/16″ x 2″ bolt (holds the wood dowel handle on)
• 1 – 1″ x 1/2″ x 3/8″ plywood block
• a couple of pieces of 1″ x 1/4″ flat stock (base & crank)

6" Dia Plywood Disc with 3/8" Thick Block Glued in Place. The Block determines coil thickness.

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