Q&A: HOW TO ADJUST PITCH ON WIND TURBINE BLADES?

This may be more complicated than you want, but it will work very well.

You can make an extremely simple blade out of a flat piece of wood (longer than wider) glued, or whatever method you use, fastened to a straight dowel from the hardware store. Now buy some PVC pipe that has a close *inner* diameter to your dowel. The closer the better, until it actually starts to get tight. Now just cut off some lengths of pipe so that they’re short, but long enough to support the weight of your blade. Drill some holes in your whatever rotating thing that you have, and stick the little PVC plugs inside. Now, before you do anything else, at each plug, take some time to draw some kind a degree or factional gradation, and then draw a fixed line on each dowel so that it’s in the same place on each blade. This will allow you to rotate all of your blades equally and accurately (or is it precisely? I always forget which word to use) when you do rotate them, so that you can get good data for your report, or whatever it is that you’re doing. Also, make some kind of little catch mechanism (could be as easy as a series of tiny pins) so that your blades don’t just blow horizontal and out of alignment during your experiment.

Stick the dowel into the PVC plug. You’ll want some way to lubricate your little joint so that they’re easy to turn. You can’t use 3-in-1 oil, because that would just soak into the wood. You can’t use grease, unless you can somehow manage to find a *really* loose grease. Otherwise, it will stick. My recommendation would be to go the hardware store and spend a few dollars on some graphite lubricant. It won’t do anything but make your joint very slick (which is why graphite is one of the #1 choice in lubing everything from industrial machinery to parts of automobiles to certain things in your garage). Now this slickness isn’t technically absolutely necessary. If you have your dowel really stuck in there, you’ll eventually be able to turn it to a new position, but it will chatter, and stick, and be very difficult to make sure that everything is the same around your entire turbine.

Respect the graphite. It has a tendency to get everywhere, so don’t wear nice clothes, and do wear and apron, or lab coat, or something like that. Keep some water and a washcloth around to keep your hands from becoming slippery. Finally, this is almost never a problem, but I’ll say it anyway – don’t eat or intentionally inhale the graphite. It won’t kill you, but it’s not healthy, either. However, using it as a simple and common lubricant, with some normal common sense, there’s absolutely *nothing* to worry about.

Good luck with the project!