Building a windmill to keep in my yard
It’s hard to pin down exactly what motivated me to make this windmill. Some confluence of a number of factors I’m aware of:
- I love the Eames film Solar Do-Nothing Machine
- My grandpa made a windmill out of popsicle sticks when I was a kid and I thought it was really cool.
- I made my own popsicle stick windmill a few years back, but it’s since been lost to decay and a move.
- I love things that make the weather tangible or translate it into another sense: rain gauges, kinetic sculptures, wind chimes, the traditional Japanese shishi-odoshi (bamboo deer scarer), those little solar powered bobble heads that you put in your window sill or car dashboard...
- We got a 3d printer recently and I’ve been itching for a new project to model.
So I started sketching and got my ideas together.
Once I had my head wrapped around it, I got into OnShape, started printing parts and assembling. I had recently finished another project where I started using bamboo skewers as a supplementary construction material, and I wanted to make something a little bigger using the same concept.
I’ve had some 5mm steel balls in the garage that I salvaged from some discarder equipment somewhere along the way, printing my own bearing races and cages seemed like a good way to make use of these.
Turns out that bearings are actually hard to get right and add a bunch of unnecessary weight, so once I finally got it all together, the only motion in the whole structure way in the flex of the bamboo skewers 😂 Add to that the fact that I had picked literally the absolute worst time to be testing a windmill in Houston…
So I went back to the drawing board with the intent to eliminate the bearings, simplify things, and just rely and loose connections to allow for the rotational motion. Between the reduced friction, increased rotor blades surface area, and some actual wind to work with, I finally had something that would move!
Final step is to run the whole print and assembly process again, document it better, send them out to family and friends, and post the final assets to Printables! I’ll update this post with a link to the files when I get them uploaded.
Thanks for reading!