My recent wind turbine construction course with PureSelfMade is taking place in Glücksburg, a town in the north of Germany. We’ll go through the venue, have a quick look at some facts and show you the crew for this new adventure. The course participants are a group of 7 students from America. They are currently doing an advanced training course on renewable energies at the university of Copenhagen.

In this course we build a 2F Piggott turbine (2m diameter, ferrite magnets)

Venue

The venue is the “artifact – centre for sustainable development”, a pseudo-hippie, clean-energy and warm-hearted place in Glücksburg, Germany, Around the actual venue of the course is a great collection of different experiments for children and adults – all regarding renewable energy. Their website is here, please feel free to contact them if you are looking for a nice venue for some events.

Our course will take place in two different rooms. A room is dedicated for teaching wood techniques or general concepts about energy. The other room is dedicated to metal work, with a quite crowded workbench that has obviously seen better days. But since we are all well motivated, it’s cleanup time! We’ve organized both rooms for our students with the kind help of Antonin and Reimer.

The wood & electric workshop

The metal workshop

We had to spend some time to provide a nice and friendly working environment for our course participants. Once we cleaned up the space and provided all the important tools within reach we were ready to start.

Workshop after tidying up – ready to go!

As always, the participants were provided with the glorious guide how to build the best wind turbine in the Universe. They have most of the important steps and absolutely all the indispensable details for getting confused in the process of building their own turbine in the future.

We’ve decided to streamline the building process in this course for time constraint reasons. To speed things up, we’ve already prepared the stator mould, we’ve cast one of the magnet rotors and we’ve provided the participants with a professional Pure-Self-Made coil winder.

In terms of innovation, we’re trying to streamline the fabrication process of the rotor by trying out something new: A belt of plastic around the disc instead of the classic plywood mould. How that worked you can see in in the review.

The new mould idea

The Crew

We’ve put together a great crew for this course, three interesting individuals ready to make a change in this world.

The fearless leader – 22-year-old self-taught wind turbine enthusiast and founder of PureSelfMade, Jonathan is the main organizer of the course and the spiritual leader of the bunch. He’ll mostly focus on making sure the blades are sharp and shining by the end of the course. Of course, as a trustworthy leader, he will run around making sure everyone is not messing up too much.

The unexpected professor – For his own surprise, Luiz became a professor on electrical engineering at the University of Toulouse. Light hearted and witty, Luiz’s role in the course is to make the electric machine without wreaking havoc in his wake. Expert in avoiding experience in electrical issues, he’s the theory-enthousiast-paper-engineer-gone-academic element of this crazy mix.

The professional steel worker – Directly from Mannheim, Thomas has a vast experience with steel work. He’ll be leading the participants through the difficult quagmire building the steel frame of the turbine. After working with people for a year in Uganda, he’s the perfect man for teaching people things they’ve never thought being able to learn.

OK, we hope we are well prepared and look forward to run a great course for our students. We will let them soak in the knowledge from practical working! We are sure they will enjoy it, people always do at wind turbine courses 😉

Have a look at our amazing review of this course HERE!