GOD BLESS MR. SAVONIUS!

Enlarge Image Image Gallery

GARY N. BREGG and the Students and Instructors of R.E.T.S. Electronic School in Wyoming, Michigan

To the man who first thought up the S-rotor . . . may his fertile mind be blessed! And to Jim Sencenbaugh and all the others who've provided us with hours of informative reading (and imagination stimulation) in the pages of THE MOTHER EARTH NEWS® . . . may they also be blessed with good days on Mother Earth.

After a year of thinking, talking, writing, and doing—and on our third attempt—we finally have a working wind-powered electrical generator.

Our first two models were Stewart-type windplants loosely patterned after the unit designed and built by Jim Sencenbaugh (see MOTHER NO. 20). Number One was equipped with wooden blades and Number Two's prop was skinned in aluminum. Both were beautiful, but neither lasted long . . . each was doomed from the beginning because of stresses we failed to consider.

Then we read about the S-rotor (see MOTHER NOS. 26, 27, and 28) and started again. Some generous people from a local aluminum extrusion factory provided the metal we needed (it was easy to work with and light in weight) and we used sabre saws (a band saw would have been better) to cut four 32"-diameter round plates—with axle holes in their centers—from quarter-inch-thick sheet aluminum.

The curved "bucket" sections of our rotor were cut and rolled from .040" sheet aluminum. With the help of some half-inch aluminum angle, they were then fastened to the 32"-diameter plates: Sections of the angle were first bent to the proper curves, laid out on the circular plates, and secured with sheet metal screws. The .040" "buckets" were then pop-riveted to the vertical flanges of the pieces of angle. Presto. The S-rotor's body was done.