Pelton Turbine Wheel

grabcad

Got involved in helping run a fab lab during Museomix (http://www.museomix.org/en/) which saw folks working on hastily scrabbled together teams to remix, reinvent and rethink interactive museum exhibits. One of the teams wanted a scale replica of a Pelton Turbine wheel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelton_wheel), so knocked up a design in Fusion then used Inventor proper to layout the drawings, as well as 123D Make to convert the solid bucket/collector into a stacked plywood form. Had to use Rhino to convert the inch-based output from 123D Make (version we ran had a bug that force inch output) and the software for the iffy Chinese software for the laser cutter was a pain without half decent scaling tools. DXF of all the key components is available, with a few notes on numbers required - it's worth noting that the design is based on 3mm ply, which in fact, consistently measured up as 3.2mm. All laser cut and assembled (buckets are glued together, then nailed using the guide holes in the wheels.