I've been posting in another forum for a while, but not getting much response, so I'm moving over here because you guys seem to be on top of responding to peoples posts, giving good, sound instruction, and paying attention to detail to what other people are doing in their builds... Plus John seems to be using this forum regularly and well, its his design
Before someone goes and tells me to buy the books, let me start by saying that I have all 3 of them already, and have read them. I'm not saying that I understand the content of all of them, but I have read them and am familiar with the concepts that are in them...
My first attempt at this build I used neodymium magnets (Just because I had some) But I have since changed it over to ceramic magnets. It is NOT a bicycle wheel, but rather a backside lawn mower pulley. I cleaned the bearings out thoroughly and then lightly lubed them with 3-in-1 oil. It is mounted to a wood frame with stainless steel bolt and washers and nut.
The coil is made from a simple plastic wire spool, using 20 and 24 gauge magnet wire, but I didn't count the "turns" as I rolled, I just used ALL of the wire I ordered, which was only 158 feet... I'm guessing that is why I am not getting very much current or voltage even when I spin it up with 12 volts... The core is made up of many many pieces of simple bailing wire (The kind used for tying re-bar together before pouring concrete). The whole coil itself is about 3 inches long and about 2.5 inches wide. Remember that this wheel is only about an inch wide with round ceramic magnets that just fit into the grove, double stacked, so they come out to the rim of the wheel. The magnets pass over the core of the coil perfectly, they are the same size... the magnets do NOT pass over the complete width of the coil, maybe this is why I'm not getting much power out of it??? PLEASE TELL ME
I have made the mistake now (several times) of running the unit without a charging battery hooked up. It has taken a lot of research for me to find out that is why I keep blowing transistors!
I'm using a 2n3055 Transistor, a single 1n4007 and 1n4001 diode along with a 5k linear pot that has a 100 Ohm resistor inline with it. The hookup wire I'm using is a solid core telephone wire (May not be thick enough???) I actually used the design I found on Daftmans website to build the circuit, because of the easy looking layout.For now, I have the circuit hooked through a breadboard just to make it easier to place everything since my wood is so thick... And I'm using simple PCB mount terminals hook batteries into. I have one of the PCB terminals set for the charge output, and one for the input battery. I also included a jack to plug in a power source (Wall-Wart) It works... mostly... It just isn't producing the power I had hoped for. But as I stated earlier, I think its due to the coil wires not being long enough. If I'm wrong PLEASE TELL ME!!!
I have a little more than 600 feet of 26 and 30 gauge wire on order to build another coil... but after reading I'm afraid that they may be too thin... What do you guys think with a little setup like this? I also have some wire wound 1k pots on order... It seams that the 5k linear pots burn up too easily, plus they don't adjust very well for tuning.
I also want to add a capacitor to the unit... but I cant figure out how to get it to discharge into the battery. I keep overcharging them and they just sit there, holding the charge instead of dumping to the battery. I cant seem to find a simple designed circuit to do this. I've seen Johns design, but its hard for my little brain to wrap around since its made for 7 transistors instead of just 1. Also I still cant figure out how to hook up the analog meters correctly...
Any and ALL help is greatly appreciated!!! Thanks for reading my extra long post! lol... like I said, Im transfering what Ive done from a different forum to this one... And I started it all with one big post!
Here are the pictures of my unit... In the building stage, and the current stage...