Research and Development of a Turbine

This is the core half of the die for the turbine blade being profiled on the little CNC.

The other pic is of the two die halves and the first two blades to be produced.

Below is my set up for milling / sawing the vein slots into the hub. The print called for 40 blades, I put in 36, which worked out to an even 10 degrees.
It only took a few minutes to get all the slots put into the hub.

The saw arbor was made by my friend, Mr. Motion.

With all the blades / veins pressed out and fitted snuggly in place, it was time to solder it all in place....and as the afternoon would prove, it was easier said than done.

As this picture shows, the results of the attempt to solder the veins to the hub were disasterous at best. The heat melted some of the veins and the solder would not stick. After that I decided to put the hub on the drill shank and see how fast it would spin with a air nozzle pointed at it. It was a very high pitch scream. I became concerned that one of the blades would spin out of the hub so I turned it from a vertical plane to a horizontal plane and the hub came off the drill shank, hit the floor and took off. Oh, did I mention that it was still a little hot. So now we have a hot, screaming chunck of spinning brass with 36 sharp little blades, on the floor, looking to chew someone's ankles.

So it was back to the drawing board. And I figured that since I had a saw that was .032 thick, maybe I could just cut the veins into the hub.

My first pass around produced 36 very thick veins, so I offset the index head by 30 minutes and ran the pass again which produced 72 veins, each .024 thick. I feel much more comfortable with this unit and this one screams as well if not better. Plus the issue of balance is not really an issue as it could have been with the soldered unit.