Vintage Windmill and Wind Generator Forum

Those who work on mills for a living roll their eyes at some of us hobbiest restorers I am quit sure. The crazy amount of hours spent on junk. But to fire up the big woodstove and enjoy long evenings and weekends in the shop and out of bars or vegetating in front of boob tube is intensely satisfying. Case in point....I am currently working on an early open gear Currie and had acquired two trashed out fans as a start and watched a few years before a head showed up. Sail sections and rims were shapeless and were in rough shape and unlike other brands of sails where you pop off riveted brackets and run through slip roll and re-rivet.... these have a broke lip on each end as the bracket.
I

I started hammering out the major creases and straighten out the lips and run through the slip roll and they came out great but needed to put the lip back on each end. I made a mandrel out of scrap iron of correct length and radi of both ends. It needed to be heavy as I would be forming the sail lips to contour of mandrel after rolling. It was very successful. Especially the large end that has larger radius.

The small end radius was giving me forming issues on some of the sails and as the small end lip was seldom damaged due to tighter radius thus more rigid structure I quit hammering out the small lip before rolling. I modified my slip roll to accept the lip on end of roll and run them through and only had to form large end radius lip on mandrel. Every sail was formed on,mandrel thus all were consistent and bolted up perfect. The issue with the small end forming was it sometimes would develop a wrinkle in tight radius and I had to slit and mig weld up slit in lip. Just throwing this out there and might give someone an idea how to handle their next crazy challenge.
Rod

That's good work, looks like it turned out great! I'm partial to Currie open gear windmills, that's the first windmill I took down and brought home, many years ago!

Very nice

I also made an end-of-sail-bending-jig. You did good!

I think I made mine when I did a wheel for Mas-1.

grezmonki.

Thinking about your problem with the small end of the blade. It brings up a question. When the blades were put in the roller did you put them in with the roller on the center line of the blade. All blades are rolled with the center of the blade parallel with the roller. ( Middle of the large end to the middle of the small end)

Yea I kept center line centered when rolling. I clamped each corner to mandrel while forming also. I was lazy or would have made die's for bead roller and might have been much better.
Rod

Paul, Rod was the mastermind of this project, I'm just an admirer.

Sorry, My mistake.I apologize.