I am planning a tower with a height of around 40 ft. Turbine will have 10.6 to 13 ft dia blades. Max distance from top Guy wire will be 6-7 ft for blade clearance. Tower top weight will be close to 100 lbs. My question is this: What dia pipe should be used? I'm looking at 4" x .100 wall and 4" x .187 wall. Enough? I plan furling around 25mph and brake if winds are consistently over that. I watched MN's video on loading but he didn't go quite to my scale. Thanks.
I think the easiest thing you could do is to get one of Hugh Piggott's books on how to build a wind turbine. There will be recommendations in there on tower diameter, guy wire size, wind turbine frame size, etc. The calculations are not super simple and if you mess up ... kaboom! Go with what he recommends and you should be fine. I think his book is only about 20 bucks.
Thanks for the reply. I planned on getting the book but had no idea it had tower recommendations too.
I am pretty sure that it does have tower recommendations if I remember correctly but I know for sure that it has detailed plans on how to build the yaw mount. This includes the diameter of the pipe to be welded to the yaw mount which slides of the tower pipe. So if you know this, you know that your tower pipe should be just small enough to fit into the yaw mount pipe.
I purchased the digital download from Amazon. It does have good info on yaw and furling tail mounts. Not much on tower pipe sizes other than a min recommended size. He says 2.875 inch dia min. I am sure the dia I am looking at will work fine as long as I use guy wires appropriately.
