I’ve been looking at those expensive towering wind turbines you often see scattered through some train layouts. Well I decided to make one for my Tombstone Southwest RR, so I set in search of some motor device I could use. I found some of those hand held summer fans you see kids walking around with in hot weather over at the Dollar Tree. They were only $1.00 each so I bought a few of them (figuring I coulduse the motors for other projects as well). I took them apart (really easy) and gutted the insides of the nice framework, leaving only the motor. While doing this I decided that maybe I should make a small wind farm for my layout instead, so I wired three of the fans together. They normally run on triple A batteries, but I hooked them up to a transformer block I had lying around along with a toggle switch I put in my fun box and they ran beautifully together.
I took off the cheap flimsy plastic fan blades and used them as a pattern to cut out some thin wood blades from 1/8" birch plywood and glued these in place of the flimsy blades. Work well. I also made a false building to tack these on and low and behold I had not just one turbine but three on my Tombstone Wind Farm (owned and operated by Wyatt Earp. Earp, always trying to make a buck in the old days, would have loved being apart of this money making project for the community – if they had the technology then.) Here’s some pictures of the gutting process and a short video of the wind farm in action.
