Wooden wind generator
 

Wooden blades? No, all wood (nearly) construction! Pretty cool actually. Doesn't produce much power though. But, it is pretty small too.

Wooden wind generator

http://www.otherpower.com/images/woodmill10.jpg

I was just thinking about that wind turbine the other day, I read about it when they had the story in home power 8 years ago, my favorite part is the magnetic dirt from the driveway.

lol yeah I thought that was pretty ingenious!

This one's cool too. More metal but more power. Real bearings help. Wood - AX, another wooden wind generator.

It's projects like this that give otherpower credibility, sure they made a wind generator out of wood and it didn't perform as well as something you buy, but it performed as well as one made out of wood and on a budget could do, because it was designed well from the ground up instead of just tossing together random parts.

gawd I wish I had that much extra time on my hands...

too much for me

It's cool that it's made out of wood instead of plastic.

I would like to thanks for the time you've contributed in composing this post. This is great.

The power ratings usually given by the manufacturers for wind turbines are nearly useless, in that they are determined at wind speeds much higher that you will normally see. A good rough formula to keep in mind in evaluating different wind turbines

I thought it was a joke :) Cool generator, looks like a toy.

I believe this wooden windmill is very innovative and challenging in its principles. I might try it some day, but I think there might be far easier ways to make electricity, especially in our new century! Good job, though! We'll see who can challenge the Bloom Energy method?!

Wood is certainly adequate for moderate size blades. It is still used for aircraft propellers, laminated as unidirectional plywood to avoid warps. Carving a first-class shape is not really hard. You can print out the station templates with an angle of attack line, and just set them up on your workbench with the blade on a hub to swing in for checks.

Having carved perhaps a thousand windmill blades in the 1980's I wonder why more people do not just go to a two bladed prop. My blades really flew, in about 10kts of wind, they filled the circle, ie in theory every molecule of air got to impart it's energy to the blade. fewer blades = less drag, although multi blades may produce more power in light winds.
But most people do not live in places windy enough to pay for a windmill.