The Water Wagon

This is something that has become popular among the third world but I think it would be great to have on in the "modern" western countries too.

www.metaefficient.com/food-and-drink/hipporoller-water-carrier.html

Unfortunately they don't make them over here. So I designed my own. I took a 200 litter tank that used to have grapefruit concentrate in it-Yum-Yum, and added a hub onto it. The hub is actually from the electric scooter that I cannibalized the make parts of the wind turbine generator.

Basically you can take any tiny hub off a scooter or perhaps a wheel barrow or something. It should ideally have some existing holes in it where it was bolted toger. Many smaller hubs are two "bowl" like shapes screwed together. Anyway I took one of these hub halve "bowls" and screwed it to a piece of wood. Then I glued the wood to the top and the bottom of the tank in such a way the the center of the hub which is made to house an axle is centered within the cylinder top and bottom(in this case the tank). Then just weld a frame as you see one one above. It consists of two bolts that slip into the center of the hub and but up against the wood board that the hub is screwed onto. The top of the handle frame is what was the steering from the scooter.
It carries up to 220 liters which is technically 220kg plus. I imagine you would not want to fill it all the way up unless you were going down hill the whole time- unless ofcourse it is too steep down hill too. The rest is up to how ever many horse powers you have stored within your buns.

90% Recycled Wind Rotor

I am proud to present a wind rotor made from everything reused and recycled with material rescued from our landfill. The body consists of an plastic drum that somebody had turned into a pontoon boat so fortunately they did the hardest part of cutting the drum in half. Needless to say it's sailing days were over. :-).

Drums are staggered and joined together with a a piece of plywood the fits the curvature of the joining drum halves. I drilled the hole extra big to get the shaft through and then secured to shaft to the drum by drilling three roof screws in the gap between the oversized hole for the shaft and the shaft. No need to worry about exact measurements as give or take a couple screws will provide plenty of friction to hold the rotor to the shaft. Do it for top and bottom where the shaft pierces the rotor.  You need to use exterior grade plywood for this piece of wood as regular wood will split.

Can you recognize this metal bracket? It is a canabolized castor wheel- the kind that has a peg that mounts into pipes. The peg inserts into a bike wheel from out beloved tip whose had the axle removed from it. I realized the 60kg rating castor wheel would make a great vertical mounted ball bearing as it is made to hand a lot of vertical weight.

Once the castor wheel bracket is mounted allow the shaft to rest onto the hub of the wheel.  You will need to remove the existing axle out of the bike wheel.  I then stuck a bolt into the other end of the wheel hub which ended long enough to span the wheel hub and shaft(which is a hollow pipe. Then I just sandwiched a rag to take away the slack of the loose fit.  Don't worry about making perfect fits, its not needed and the inspector will probably leave you alone in this project.  In the shaft a small hole was drilled close to the bottom where some wire was spliced through and tied down onto the spokes. Leave the reflector on so the wheel doesn't hit any Roos in the night.          

The motor was part of a electric scooter that was tipped because most assume when the scooter breaks everything breaks on it. Usually a transistor on the microcontroller fries, but the reality is that the motor and the batteries are in very good condition. This batteries and a motor bought in a shop can set you back 100 buckers. The motor needs to be a DC motor.

 

Because this is paddock standard technology where only the sheep judge you, don't worry about the fact that the wheel will probably bob up and down on the horizontal plan due to the rag not being up to code. No problem- just mount the motor on a board(from a palette in the case) and screw it against the frame with one screw. The will allow the whole assembly to move up and down and the wheel spins and boogies.  Stick an extra piece of wood to help for the motor assembly to but up against as the wheel pulls it a bit in the direction of the rotation so things don't get too out of alignment.  Even sheep have their limits for sloppiness.               

Just allow the motor shaft to rest on the wheel and let father friction do the rest.... so long as it is in the right place.  With a moderate wind, I get the motor rotating about 300 rpm, which for the rotating drum spells about 11 rpm. It goes quite a bit faster without a battery being charged with it but I guess that doesn't mean anything.  I imagine there are far more effective motors but this one was part of the untipped reality.

 I got a DC to DC converter on ebay for about 8 bucks. This is kind of a critical piece if you want to charge up your batteries correctly. Set the voltage on the converter to about 14 volts or so. You probably wont find this at the tip but will find it on ebay.

 Goto radio shack or Jaycar and grab a bunch of 50v or higher diodes. You can scavenge on off an old circuit board if you are too lazy to hit a shop. This goes on the positive lead coming out of the converter and goes to the positive lead on your battery. BTW- don't assume that the red lead on your motor it the positive lead, as the orientation of the motor may be switched and the motor may be running in "backwards" which is not big deal. So get your volt meter out and spin the rotor in the direction it was designed to go to sleuth out the "real" positive.

Here is another version I imagine should work made out of an old metal shed and some roofing iron, screwed together by the screws salvaged from the dismantled pontoon boat. It actually weighs about 2x as much as the other rotor but have almost 4x the surface space. I imagine you can put two motors on this one. Also I was thinking of making on out of perspex plastic corrugated roofing which will have a transparent look.  

(Follow up Oct 15th -finally got the one out of perspex going I love how it looks and is far more sensitive to the wind, and barely visible.)

Ok, Ok I lied- the frame is not recycled. It was timber bought from Bunnings. Build it with plenty of clearance top and bottom and the diameter. Here's a case of too big will not cause problems but too small will be as good as not doing it at all. I used old rollerblade wheel bearing (3 each) on top and bottom to minimize rubbing of the shaft on the frame, but overall seem not that critical as the main weight in on the vertical axis.              

I'm not going to write ridiculous disclaimers, other than to say we are always 100% responsible for what we choose to do.  Research what are dangerous things about batteries, there is not that much really when it comes to this application so long as you don't sleep next to the battery during a storm. Oh and don't admire the spinning wheel too closely as when you go to stand up the rotor may knock you on the knoggin and make you feel like you are spinning too.  Have fun!!!

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