Backyard Inventors
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There is a guy on another board I frequent, that I make sure to read all of his posts. Many are just everyday life or political, but when he starts talking about entrepreneurship, inventions or metalwork, I perk my ears. Hailing from the Rust Belt, but now living in the Southwest for health reasons, the guy has worked as a mechanic on gas and diesel trucks, including some really big stuff. He's ran one of the country's largest truck stops before selling it. He's a machinist that has invented and made several items over the years, either marketing them himself or selling the rights to them. He had a pretty successful small business milling mesquite lumber on a sawmill he built and making woodcrafts with the boards. He made scale replicas of cannons and occasionally still does.
In short, his mind works a little different than most.
We were having a discussion about renewable energy and wind power. I'm going to post an excerpt of one of his posts:
If you want to generate electrical power we have been doing that as nearly perfectly as is possible for about 100 years. we've gotten better and better and better at it. when I first went into the automotive trades we were doing it with direct current generators and those were pretty good pieces of machinery. But later on they got a lot better. Somebody invented the alternating current generator, or the alternator and Everything changed after that. Tiny little diodes smaller than cherry bombs redirect randomly generated power and send it all in the same direction. Only a small solid-state component was required to change the whole world in terms of changing physical power into electrical power and if it's ever been done better since it's only marginally better and a great deal more destructive to the world around it.
When I first entered the field one could expect to overhaul his generator three or four times in the 100,000 miles he could expect his vehicle to last. Now more than 90% of vehicles go to the scrap yard wearing the same generator they left the assembly line with never having had it repaired, and instead of 100,000 miles they can expect a lifetime of over 300,000 miles in most cases. There is simply nothing one can do to make the automotive alternating current generator radically better in this day and age.
They are crudely machined cheaply assembled every concession in the world is made to save a few cents in their manufacture and yet there are nearly as perfect as can be possible.
When I was converting them to wind use I often had the stators rewound so that they would start charging at a lower revolution per minute and I geared them up using roller chains and sprockets because a really efficient wind rotor is hard to turn faster than 300 RPM's.
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You know, this is where I think we are missing the boat on renewable energy. There are small things that can be done, that we know how to do, and with smart meter technology would put a lot less strain on the grid.
Small wind generators, passive solar...Anything that could be done with a single home.
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You know, this is where I think we are missing the boat on renewable energy. There are small things that can be done, that we know how to do, and with smart meter technology would put a lot less strain on the grid.
Small wind generators, passive solar...Anything that could be done with a single home.
@Jolly said in Backyard Inventors:
You know, this is where I think we are missing the boat on renewable energy. There are small things that can be done, that we know how to do, and with smart meter technology would put a lot less strain on the grid.
Small wind generators, passive solar...Anything that could be done with a single home.
When I studied environmental science back in like the Korean War or some shit it seems now, this was the approach that was emphasized.
