Friday, April 25, 2008

final design?

i emailed some info to my group this morning, but i don't know if they got it
first of all, sorry for not emailing anything earlier, like i said i would
i've been having a nice vacation and procrastinating bigtime
however, i did a lot of thinking last night, aided by my uncle, who will supply some materials

now, everything i am saying here is my idea, and has not been communicated to the team at all yet. please respond with your thoughts

so, here's the design: it's hard to visualize, so i made a model, which i took pictures of and labeled what the counterpart in the final design will be. What the design will have for materials:

base: a piece of pipe for mounting to richard's pipe ( i have this )
platform: plywood ( i have this )
base for turbine: bicycle wheel ( i will have one of these by noon saturday )
gear to attach to central pole: from bicycle ( i will have one of these by noon saturday )
gear to attach to motor: from bicycle ( i will have many of these by noon saturday )
chain to attach gears: from bicycle ( i will have this by noon saturday )
central pole: either thick wooden dowel or hollow pvc tube ( i don't have this but it's easy to get )
skeleton for helix: coathangers ( i will have a huge number of these saturday )
"flesh" of helix: plastic wrap or aluminum foil ( i have some, you have some, more is available )
attachment: assorted nuts, bolts, maybe welding, and glue ( i have most or all of this )

here's pictures, the labels are too small too read in the post, but if you click the picture you can read them. :)

3 comments:

GeekTeach said...

Nick,

Will the helix actually spin in the wind??

~Richard.

nikolardo said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
nikolardo said...

this helix will not spin in the wind because the toothpicks are straight, not curved.
however, the version this is modelling will use coathangers, which will be curved and this will spin in the wind.