Soil pipe propeller
Using a piece of readily available 6" diameter PVC soil pipe, this aerodynamically 2 bladed propeller was produced.
30" in length, the pattern was printed off and glued to the inside of half of the pipe.
A hacksaw and file were used to create the propellers profile.
Because the soil pipe is made of P.V.C it will fade in U.V light - a good coat of paint should be applied.
New: I have read that over time, maybe 2 years with exposure to light PVC can become brittle, not ideal
when a prop is running at 200rpm - a safer alternative is to use A.B.S pipe.
Bicycle wheel hubs make good strong reliable mounts, for both the vertical and horizontal bearings. One of the flanges can be
either hack sawed off or removed on a lathe.
The blade profile can be downloaded as a PDF file or JPG image and printed off - it will require 3 sheets of A4 paper .
The vertical lines are position markers. Please print in landscape at 100%
PDF version here
click to enlarge (60Kb)
New: If anyone can design a method of 'nesting' or tessellating 3 of these curved propellers together to produce a six blade prop similar to this
I would be very interested to know. contact
Visitor Stephen Slater suggested
Having looked at your pvc pipe propeller, it seems to me that you could use one of these as a mould to fabricate three others in fibreglass, each identical, but leaving the centre section 'unresined' as it were. If these were then placed on a flat board at the correct relative angles then the centres could be resined together and at the same time a pre-drilled, strengthened, centre boss or hub could be incorporated.
See the Video of my soil pipe propeller design (623 Kb) WMV Format
NEW: Larger Video 640X480 (3.47 Mb) WMV Format here
All Images kindly processed for free by enhanced-images.com
