Another fantastically easy wind turbine, made with a hard-drive motor with the right type of pressure plate and some identical paper clips about as long as the drive radius. Again, there is really nothing to explain that the pictures don't easily convey, except I had to be careful not to strip the tiny soft-metal plate nuts. The resulting product is actually very well balanced when spinning.
Safety note: while this doesn't seem to spin quite as fast as the CD turbine, hard disk platters are a good deal heavier and could probably still do some damage to small, curious, furry ground-dwellers. And if those clips are notched and break, well, send me a photo of the platter embedded in the side of your house, please.
I had a mini version with 2.5" disks tear apart on me because the paper
clips I used were too light and I had bent them all out of shape from many
sessions of tuning the tilt of the blades. I still haven't found one of
the platters. Hopefully I will before someone runs over it with a lawnmover.
However, A 3.5" disk version I have, using heavy paperclips, has reliably
survived several severe squalls and extended windy days.
A note about the motor shown here, from one of those old black Conner/Seagate drives. It fits a bottlecap nicely. Sometime soon I'll show you why that's a very nice thing.
