Making a Simple Wind Turbine for my O Gauge Layout

[Sturgeon-Phish]

Neat idea

Jim

[JTrains]

baggetta

I found some of those hand held summer fans you see kids walking around with in hot weather over at the Dollar Tree.  They were only $1.00 each so I bought a few 

Too funny - when I saw the subject of this post, before reading the rest I thought the exact same thing about using some cheap motorized fans as a starting point.  Maybe paint the bases something other than their native neon green - perhaps a nice aluminum or silver?

[baggetta]

I've been looking at those expensive towering wind turbines you often see scattered through some train layouts.  Well I decided to make one for my Tombstone Southwest RR, so I set in search of some motor device I could use.  I found some of those hand held summer fans you see kids walking around with in hot weather over at the Dollar Tree.  They were only $1.00 each so I bought a few of them (figuring I coulduse the motors for other projects as well).  I took them apart (really easy) and gutted the insides of the nice framework, leaving only the motor.  While doing this I decided that maybe I should make a small wind farm for my layout instead, so I wired three of the fans together.  They normally run on triple A batteries, but I hooked them up to a transformer block I had lying around along with a toggle switch I put in my fun box and they ran beautifully together. 

I took off the cheap flimsy plastic fan blades and used them as a pattern to cut out some thin wood blades from 1/8" birch plywood and glued these in place of the flimsy blades.  Work well.  I also made a false building to tack these on and low and behold I had not just one turbine but three on my Tombstone Wind Farm (owned and operated by Wyatt Earp.  Earp, always trying to make a buck in the old days, would have loved being apart of this money making project for the community -- if they had the technology then.)  Here's some pictures of the gutting process and a short video of the wind farm in action.

Hope you enjoyed looking at this.

Tombstone Southwest RR