# Windmills



## SailorDon (Jan 6, 2008)

I added a couple of windmills to my backyard layout. Here is a video of the result.

Windmills video


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## John J (Dec 29, 2007)

Great looking Windmills. Where did you get them? 

I was thinking of getting maybe 6 or 8 and put in a wind Farm as a industry.

JJ


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## SailorDon (Jan 6, 2008)

I bought my 17" windmills (5" diameter turbine blade) from etech n stuff

http://www.yardgardenwindmill.com/s...69275.html

I paid extra for the "Texas Tail"


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## Big65Dude (Jan 2, 2008)

After I completed my Victorian water tower, I needed a pump house to fill it with water. Question was: how to "power" the pump.

In the days before electricity was readily available, stationary steam engines were sometimes used to power pumps that brought water up from below ground. If you were lucky enough to have a water source above your tower, then you could just let gravity do the job - but that wasn't often the case, particularly out on the pancake-flat "Great Plains." There, the railroads often resorted to an abundant and (usually) reliable alternate power source - the wind. (They were "going green" long before it became PC.)

So I decided to build a windmill-powered pump house using my own "free-lance" design based on several prototypes I'd seen in old photos. Building the the house and tower was no problem - just straight-forward wooden construction, but the windmill itself presented a challenge. The commercially available models I looked at were all just a tin disk with radial slits cut in it and bent into a toy-like pinwheel. 










I finally found a plastic (or resin, actually) windmill model I liked from *Muella Scale Models* and used that. Unfortunately, when I eventually set it up outside, the windmill caught the wind so well that it actually lifted off the ground - almost like a helicopter - and blew over on its side. When the spinning windmill wheel hit the deck, the blades went flying everywhere.










The solution to that problem was to securely mount the water tower and pump house on a heavy concrete backer-board base and recreate the windmill wheel and vane from brass. The Muella "air motor" and its mount were used as a basis for the rebuild and sealed ball bearing races for the swivel and the wheel hub were installed.









I found plans for a typical farm windmill online, scaled them out for my model, and used them as a "template" for the new wheel. Luckily, a slice from a copper plumbing elbow proved to be just the right diameter and thickness for the inner band. I cut the "sails" from thin sheet brass, clamped them all together and cut a slot through them all at once, about a third of the way from the ends, for the outer band. It was then a simple matter of bending a piece of brass bar stock into a circle of the proper diameter for the outer band and using it to set the proper angle for each of the sails.









I then soldered the whole thing together. In this shot, the inner end of each blade, bent at a right angle, has not yet been trimmed off and the ball bearing hub has not yet been installed. The vane was constructed in a similar manner using the same sheet brass and L-shaped brass "angle iron." 
It had never occurred to me that I could actually build an acurate farm-type windmill model in metal. I figured something like that was way beyond my capaility, but I surprised myself. It seems that necessity is indeed "... the mother of invention."


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