Back to work after a long night, we first started work on making the rotor. The square pipe (now with plates welded to it's edges) had to have a central hole made on it so that the axle could pass through it. This was done on the lathe machine (drilling and boring)
Next job was to again attempt to make the slot (for mounting the grooved rod) This time, we tried to make it on L-angles. However, we were still unsuccessful. Jaydeep tried multiple tools, even grinding it, but we still weren't able to achieve a proper slot. The trouble was that our slot dimensions were such that it required two over-lapping holes to be drilled, and the drill bit always got misaligned while drilling the second hole. We stopped this process and decided to try milling the slot instead. (but we need to wait until someone who knows how to operate the machine can help us)
Then we needed to weld the high-speed steel blades to our square rotor. We initially planned to bolt the plates onto the square pipe rotor, but realised that it was too hard to be cut by the tools that we had. So they had to be welded, which was done with the help of Sidhdharaj Sir. The rotor rod (axle) was welded to the square pipe, and our rotor was finally ready!!
We soon realised that our rotor was very small in comparison to the pedestal bearings, and that we would need to mount our pedestal bearing vertically instead of horizontally so that the grooved rod could be mounted close enough to the rotor. (there should be only around 0.5-1.5mm clearance between the grooved rod and rotor blades) The frame was modified accordingly.
With pedestal bearings in place, we fixed the pulleys onto the shafts and motor. We cut L-angles to which the motor could be fixed. Before welding the motor L-angles, we thought we should run a trial test. We rotated the shaft by hand for this test. We rotated the shaft in two directions: (pic below)
Conclusion: It would be better to rotate in direction (b) since the banana stem tended to get cut more often in direction (a). We also realised that our blades were misaligned (unequal distance from the centre) We would urgently need to fix this in order for our machine to work well. We decided to break for the night.
