The only windmill pump heads I have seen were in the scrap yard. I put a few there myself.
I never really paid much attention. The few old timers I know that used them said they would turn out of the wind well enough but would lock in place and need to be reset manually.

I tried an off set self furling design many years ago when I was in high school It worked up to a certain point and then would start to oscillate horribly. I pretty much abandoned that design after that.

I also have an original 32 volt 1KW Paris Dunn from the 1930's. It tips itself up to slow the blades down. It worked well enough but the constant tip up and bang down did too much damage to the old windmill tower it was on. It would constantly shake the tower when it was going up or down and that constantly loosened up the tower bolts and would break the bracing cables.
I will likely restore it and put it up some time but its going to get a different control system.

But I am open to ideas though. If you have a tail control design thats known to be stable I would be interested in trying one.

Still personal preference is to just get better quality blades. My brother built a CNC machine and with a little work its capable of doing a good set of blades.
We are trying to find a good airfoil design so we can do a set set out of wood and then do a fiberglass overlay.

Doing something myself and watching it fail sits better with me. Far more so than paying someone to fail for me!

And as I stated before I never had over spin failure with my own home made blades so maybe I will just have to go back to doing it myself.

HeHEhe, no.
If its not mechanical I dont want it on my wind generator.
No micro controller anything. I can handle springs and pivot bearings, if they work!

I prefer all mechanical. Mechanical takes far more environmental abuse than electronics ever do.

I have pondered on a simple design where the generator and gearbox assembly are mounted on sliding rails and have a spring holding them forward. As the spring moves back the very end of the tail vane would tip one way just like the rudder on an airplane.
Thats about as far as I have thought out tail controlled governing systems.

Mechanical devices can't be smart though tcm =)

All that micro stuff is way beyond me and I dont care to make the investment for the equipment to program it or the time to learn how to do it. I learned PLC years ago and thats enough for me.
Smart machines might work for some but I would prefer to build a bulldozer instead of a robot.

All I need is to come up with is stronger and bigger. Thats will within my abilities.
I found Carbon fiber sheets and resin on eBay for not to extreme of price.
Perhaps I will have to buy several yards of fabric and a few gallons of resin and do an overlay of that on a pine or redwood core thats laminated with alternating carbon fiber and wood.

I think I will buy one more set of fiberglass blades and see what becomes of them first.
Another month or so and I will have all the money I spent last winter rebuilt so I will have something to work with for play money again. The bad winter drained me. So I am still limited on what nonessential or work related expenditures I can justify.

tcm, I've spent about 100 dollars total on micro controllers and a programmer. Another 50-100 on components and tools combined in my entire life for electronics. I've often seen the same arguments used for not using micro controllers. They're not that bad, it's fear of learning that's the real learning boudary.

Both my parents are teachers by profession! I am terrified of learning new things through a genetic predisposition!

Its not the cost outlay or the code and programming learning, I could likely learn it in a few good days if I wanted. Microcontrolers are becoming more interesting to me day by day thanks to guys like you and a few others here.
I just dont see the need for it in many applications. I realize the set up is cheap and easy to do. The problem is all of the added circuitry to make a micro controller live in a harsh electrical environment and actually control something is what I dont care for.

I like PLC systems though. Its what I learned logic control stuff on and they already have all the added protection and input/output circuitry built right in.

I just prefer that when things have to be in an outdoor environment simple rugged and mechanical works! Its what I want on my design. I already know how to make electrical and hydraulic controls and what not but simple just works for me.
Static build up, rain, snow , ice, summer heat, don't bother springs. Lightning strikes dont bother them either!

I have more than enough mechanical design and fabrication skills to add tail furling and or variable pitch blade controls if I need to. I just have had nearly 20 years of home made wind generators designs without any of that stuff that never failed from over spin issues.
A bad blade is what I am writing this one off as and thats all.

If I build my own blades and get a repeat of this incident then yea I will put more over speed protection on the designs but until then my personal experience just says a random manufacturing flaw caused the failure.

If I did not build it I cannot guarantee the quality. We all have gone through that a few times in one form or another.

Hmm...Blinking tail light.. Maybe!

I run directly to a my home made GTI unit so I dont need to worry about battery charging. I convert all usable power directly to AC and use it on my place! The GTI advantages is that I dont put current or voltage limiting on them and so they just load up the gen set as the speed increases. My GTI's go from linear to exponential load at a specific voltage. Going from 1x to 10x amps draw over a 10% voltage increase keeps any over spin from happening.
My load bank is set up to pull a very heavy load too. Should the GTI go off line the load bank will pull the gen set down so far that it will nearly stall and the blades! Blade efficiency gets very poor at low RPM's

Until I build a new wind generator I have no idea how much oscilaton I may or may not get.
SO how am I going to sense all this stuff a micro controller is going to be needing to look at and how am I going to produce an actual physical output big enough to make adjustments on a 600+ pound system?


I am doing some shop cleaning in my spare time this next week or two so should I put up a new thread relating to neat stuff I will have for sale?
I have at least 10 Trace and misc inverters of assorted sizes (multi hundred watt to multi KW capacity) that dont work plus my old 60 volt 200 AH battery bank and a bunch of other neat stuff that will likely go cheap too!

I will probibly invest in a Micro controller programing set up this fall so I have something to play with next winter if I get another 6.8 feet of snow agin and cant do anything.

Sorry my GTI's stay basically analog.
I do have one big one that I designed that does use a PLR as a safety logic watch dog. All it gets to do is change the range taps and monitor the line voltage and frequency.

It keeps its fingers out of the power control system. Monitor and do on/off, high, medium, and low input range selection. Thats its job and nothing else.

It does have the capacity to display the input and output currents, line voltage frequency, and currents, and report what mode its in but I have not bothered to do the LCD programing to display any of it.
I like the big 3.5 digit LED displays better!

Well I found the new style of blades that Wind Max is making. They are the same part numbers as the old ones but have a -WH following the part number.
Their descriptions put new manufacturing facilities, individual testing procedures, and tight quality control in big bold type now too!
Maybe that means they actually learned something from the old design!

The original blades have a 5 year life expectancy but the new ones are rated for 15 years. They also have nylon fiber reinforcement in the fiberglass and an auto furling design with a rating of 134 MPH for peak wind speed survivability!

SO I will try one more set of them and see if I can bust them too!

I think I will go with the 13.1 ft set this time. They have a 3500 watt peak capacity and cost about $260 with shipping.