Several people have admired the finish on the turbine in my recent post about Ivan Juretic’s turbine, so I asked for details.  Here is what he told me:

Hi Hugh!

The blades and wooden parts of the tail are painted with a transparent polyurethane bi-component glossy varnish “Wood gloss” of Veneziani company.

I have been using this product for many years and I have a really great experience with it. It intensifies the beauty of wood and is extremely resistant to atmospheric agents over years, but is quite demanding for the application.

It is recommended to be applied in many coats, we’ve applied 10 times with brush, and in between coats the surface need to be over and over abrade with fine sanding paper.

All metal parts are galvanized and then yet protected with two layers of high quality coating based on modified epoxy “Hempel’s Selecta Metalni Efekt DTM”.

This paint is easy to aplicate with air spray, and the painted surface looks great with some twinkling sheen. We applied this paint also on the plywood part of th tail.

Some may say it’s all together too much, an exaggeration, but like what you said, and I believe, attention to the detail is always paying off.

In the attachment I’m sending to you Data sheets of both paints what we used and some additional pictures of the painting job!

All the best.

Ivan

Veneziani_Wood_Gloss Hempel_selecta_DTM

In 2108 I reported a turbine build in Croatia by Ivan.  It’s based on my ideas but Ivan added some engineering refinements.  He just wrote to report that it is still going strong without problems.

That turbine works perfectly, for the third year in a row. And as I report to you in the mountains where it works there are really extreme conditions.

Cold, snow, ice, rain, hail, extreme turbulent wind, I don’t think it can get any worse.

But, no problems at all! It is just working.

After almost 20 months of constant operation we put it down this spring, because we just wanted to check everything and make regular maintenance.

There was little damage just on the blades leading edge, actually in the beginning I stick too short 3M protective tapes (just 30 cm) and now I repainted everything with 3 more layers of the amazing Veneziani Wood Gloss PU protective paint (use to be used for yachts) and sticked twice longer tapes.

Overall, the blades were in very very good shape, you can see it on the attached photo taken before I start reparation. The blades were made from larchwood.

The only other thing we had to change was the bronze bearing ring (blue in the drawing / bronze in the photo) on the bottom of the head because it was quite worn out. Now we’ve made it out of Teflon, and we’ll see how it behaves.

Also, the electrical system and control with your Tristar follower works really great, stable, reliable!

Again, thank you very much for all your help, and support for this amazing project.