The Generator Rotor: A Success Story in Fusion 360

I recently embarked on a mission to create a gear system that would amplify the output of my generator rotor. The goal was to increase its speed by four times, allowing me to charge up my power bank more efficiently. I decided to use Fusion 360 to design and 3D print the necessary parts.

To start, I created a smaller gear using the Spur Gear Eden feature in Fusion 360. This gear had 12 teeth and was designed to fit onto the generator rotor's surface. Next, I used the move function to position the gear so that its dotted circles aligned perfectly with those of the larger gear. This ensured that they would interlock seamlessly.

With the smaller gear in place, I created a mounting plate for it using the sketch function. I added rectangles and circles to create a solid extrusion, which served as the base for the plate. Two holes were also included for ball bearings, whose purpose would become clear later.

The next step was to complete the 3D model by adding two cylinders to the larger gear. I then created a hand crank using Fusion 360's capabilities. Although this was my first experience with the software, I found it to be much more comfortable and intuitive than previous 3D design tools I had used.

With all the parts designed, I proceeded to 3D print them using leftover PLA filament. After removing support material, I was left with a set of functional gears and mounting plates.

To assemble the gear system, I inserted ball bearings into their respective holes, attached the hand crank to one end of the larger gear's shaft, and secured it in place with nuts. Unfortunately, the shaft broke off due to excessive force, but I quickly printed a replacement with a hole in its center.

I then secured an 8mm fake threaded rod to the gear using nuts and pushed it through one ball bearing into the hand crank. This time, the system felt more stable, and I was able to attach the mounting plates to each other with M4 screws and nuts.

To complete the assembly, I removed the M3 screw holding the generator rotor in place and replaced it with a longer screw that went through the second ball bearing. By turning the hand crank, I successfully increased the generator's speed by four times, achieving my mission goal.

However, adding a USB tester and power bank revealed that I could have benefited from a higher amplification factor to efficiently charge up the power bank continuously. Nonetheless, this gear system is suitable for emergency situations, especially with an electric drill on hand.

The second gear train was designed using Fusion 360 after printing the first one. Its size is significantly smaller due to utilizing four gears instead of two, each pair having a T factor of 18:9. This results in an amplification factor of 4 when both stages are multiplied together.

By adding more gears, one could achieve even higher amplification factors but would also increase mechanical losses through friction. I hope you've enjoyed this video and will stay creative; I'll see you next time.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi there some of you might remember this wind turbine because I partly took it apart in a previous tier Y or PI episodes back then I confirmed that this wind turbine can charge USB devices when there's enough wind speeds but surprise I live in Germany and here the weather is usually not that stormy so for me this wind turbine is pretty much useless unless of course I detach the propeller and find a way to spin the generator fast enough by hand in order to generate sufficient power to accomplish this I will show you in this video how I used the fusion 360 software and my 3d printer to create two gear trains that attach to the wind turbine generator and let me spin it with sufficient speeds to output a bit of power let's get started this video is sponsored by jl CPC beer which is a PCB company that was created for fast and cheap PCB prototyping they are also very thankful for customer feedback because it helps them to improve their service so why not upload yokubou files today and try out that $2 PCB service first off we have to find out how many rpm the generator requires in order to output a decent amount of power to do that I hooked up my USB tester as well as a power bank to its USB outputs attached a piece of electrical tape onto its rotor and used my electric drill with its highest speed setting in order to spin the generator and as you can see it does output a usable amount of power and by filming the rotor with a slow motion function of my camera and later analyzing how much time the electrical tape required to finish one rotation I calculated an RPM of around 660 which equals around 11 rotations per seconds at this point I tried figuring out how many rotations I could comfortably make with the hand crank per seconds and came to the conclusion that three-year would be the maximum that means while we do three rotations with the hand crank we want the generator to turn around 12 times which would equal an amplification factor of four and that is where we need a gear train you see if we take two gears with the same amount of teeth which is in this case nine bring them together and spend one of them then you can see that the other one performs the exact same amount of revolutions per minutes as the one that is turning but if we replace the spinning one with a big idea that in this case has 36 teeth then you can see that the smaller cube performs four complete revolutions while the bigger gear only performed one this revolution factor of four to one is the same factor as the tea factory between the gears which is 36 to nine so also four to one and that is very simplified how you can change the RPM of motors or generators so now that we know that we need a small gear for the generator and a bigger gear were four times the teeth for the hand crank it was time for me to start the fusion of 60 software now I generally use the simpler one to 3d design software in order to create 3d models but in this case fusion 360 just offers more functions which are very handy to have for this task to start off I selected the tools bar opens the Eddins and selected the spooky scripts which I then opens this eden can basically create gears for us and after i put in the less important settings with some standard values we can now focus on the module number of teeth gear thickness and hole diameter variables by measuring my generator it was actually not hard to find out that I need a hole diameter of 30 millimeter and a thickness of around 17 millimeter for the number of teeth I went with 9 and for the module number I went to 5 which is pretty much the minimum I could choose because it depends on the hole diameter it is also important to note that when we later adds additional gears we need to keep the module number always the same otherwise they won't fit together with that being said I clicked on OK and thus cut the small gear which looked promising now the generator rotor comes with an unknown threats that we can use to add such a threats to the gear I switched over to the sheet metal tab and simply clicked on threats under creates next I clicked on the gears inner surface and thus was greeted with the threat settings which after doing a bit of trial and error turned out to be those and with that being done we got our first completed gear which after 3d printing it's fit perfectly onto the generators rotor so next I once again used the spur gear Eden to create the bigger 36 teeth gear with the help of the move function I then positioned the smaller gear to the sides until the dotted circles of both gears perfectly hit each other in one points which basically means that they were later perfectly interlocked in just like that we got our basic gear train to finish its hula had to do was to create two mounting plates for its which was pretty easy to do through the help of the sketch function by adding some rectangles and circles and then using the solid extrude function by the way the holes and the plates are for two kinds of ball bearings whose purpose you will see for yourself pretty soon now to complete the 3d model I simply added two more cylinders to the bigger gear and then continued by creating a hand crank honestly speaking though this was my first experience with fusion 360 year and I have to say that it is much more comfortable and intuitive to use than the one to 3d design software are used so far but anyway as you can see a mic your system what's completes and thus it was time to 3d print all the parts with some leftover PLA filament ahead laying around and after removing all support material I was basically left with these parts so I inserted all the ball bearings headed m3 screws to the hand crank pushed the bigger gear shaft through one big ball bearing and attached the hand crank to the other side of it and as you can see I can successfully turn the big gear but eventually the shaft broke off because it is not made for such forces so I 3d printed a second big year with a hole in the middle for which I got myself this 8 millimeter fake threaded rods after creating a shorter piece of its I secured it to the gear with nuts pushed it once again through one bigger ball bearing into huge ad hand crank to its this time though it felt a lot more stable and thus I pushed its shaft to the second ball bearing and secured both mounting plates to one another with m4 screws and nuts to complete the system I removed the m3 screw that holds the generators rotor in place executed to the gear system will be longer screw which goes through the second ball bearing and as you can see by turning the hand crank the generator duster on four times faster than how we crank which means this mission was a success but sadly by adding the USB tester as well as the power bank you can see that I probably should have chosen a bigger amplification factor because it was quite hard to charge up the power bank continuously it would still be suitable for emergency situations though and if you got an electric drill on your hands then you can truly charge up your power bank easily here needless to say though this gear system looks a bit ridiculous because of its size which I can totally understand and that is why I designed the second gear train in fusion 360 year after 3d printing it's and once again assembling it's in pretty much the same way as before you can see that we still got the same amplification factor than before and the generator still outputs pretty much the same power but the size of this new gear train is much smaller in comparison to the old one the reason is that we are basically using four Geass with the first pair having a t factor of 18 to 9 and the second pair also having a t factor of 18 to 9 in this case the T factor of both stages gets multiplied which once again leaves us with an amplification factor of 4 of course you could add even more chaos to the system to get ridiculous factors but then again you would also increase the mechanical losses through friction and with that being said I hope you enjoyed this video if so don't forget to Like share subscribe and hitting the notification below stay creative and I will see you next timehi there some of you might remember this wind turbine because I partly took it apart in a previous tier Y or PI episodes back then I confirmed that this wind turbine can charge USB devices when there's enough wind speeds but surprise I live in Germany and here the weather is usually not that stormy so for me this wind turbine is pretty much useless unless of course I detach the propeller and find a way to spin the generator fast enough by hand in order to generate sufficient power to accomplish this I will show you in this video how I used the fusion 360 software and my 3d printer to create two gear trains that attach to the wind turbine generator and let me spin it with sufficient speeds to output a bit of power let's get started this video is sponsored by jl CPC beer which is a PCB company that was created for fast and cheap PCB prototyping they are also very thankful for customer feedback because it helps them to improve their service so why not upload yokubou files today and try out that $2 PCB service first off we have to find out how many rpm the generator requires in order to output a decent amount of power to do that I hooked up my USB tester as well as a power bank to its USB outputs attached a piece of electrical tape onto its rotor and used my electric drill with its highest speed setting in order to spin the generator and as you can see it does output a usable amount of power and by filming the rotor with a slow motion function of my camera and later analyzing how much time the electrical tape required to finish one rotation I calculated an RPM of around 660 which equals around 11 rotations per seconds at this point I tried figuring out how many rotations I could comfortably make with the hand crank per seconds and came to the conclusion that three-year would be the maximum that means while we do three rotations with the hand crank we want the generator to turn around 12 times which would equal an amplification factor of four and that is where we need a gear train you see if we take two gears with the same amount of teeth which is in this case nine bring them together and spend one of them then you can see that the other one performs the exact same amount of revolutions per minutes as the one that is turning but if we replace the spinning one with a big idea that in this case has 36 teeth then you can see that the smaller cube performs four complete revolutions while the bigger gear only performed one this revolution factor of four to one is the same factor as the tea factory between the gears which is 36 to nine so also four to one and that is very simplified how you can change the RPM of motors or generators so now that we know that we need a small gear for the generator and a bigger gear were four times the teeth for the hand crank it was time for me to start the fusion of 60 software now I generally use the simpler one to 3d design software in order to create 3d models but in this case fusion 360 just offers more functions which are very handy to have for this task to start off I selected the tools bar opens the Eddins and selected the spooky scripts which I then opens this eden can basically create gears for us and after i put in the less important settings with some standard values we can now focus on the module number of teeth gear thickness and hole diameter variables by measuring my generator it was actually not hard to find out that I need a hole diameter of 30 millimeter and a thickness of around 17 millimeter for the number of teeth I went with 9 and for the module number I went to 5 which is pretty much the minimum I could choose because it depends on the hole diameter it is also important to note that when we later adds additional gears we need to keep the module number always the same otherwise they won't fit together with that being said I clicked on OK and thus cut the small gear which looked promising now the generator rotor comes with an unknown threats that we can use to add such a threats to the gear I switched over to the sheet metal tab and simply clicked on threats under creates next I clicked on the gears inner surface and thus was greeted with the threat settings which after doing a bit of trial and error turned out to be those and with that being done we got our first completed gear which after 3d printing it's fit perfectly onto the generators rotor so next I once again used the spur gear Eden to create the bigger 36 teeth gear with the help of the move function I then positioned the smaller gear to the sides until the dotted circles of both gears perfectly hit each other in one points which basically means that they were later perfectly interlocked in just like that we got our basic gear train to finish its hula had to do was to create two mounting plates for its which was pretty easy to do through the help of the sketch function by adding some rectangles and circles and then using the solid extrude function by the way the holes and the plates are for two kinds of ball bearings whose purpose you will see for yourself pretty soon now to complete the 3d model I simply added two more cylinders to the bigger gear and then continued by creating a hand crank honestly speaking though this was my first experience with fusion 360 year and I have to say that it is much more comfortable and intuitive to use than the one to 3d design software are used so far but anyway as you can see a mic your system what's completes and thus it was time to 3d print all the parts with some leftover PLA filament ahead laying around and after removing all support material I was basically left with these parts so I inserted all the ball bearings headed m3 screws to the hand crank pushed the bigger gear shaft through one big ball bearing and attached the hand crank to the other side of it and as you can see I can successfully turn the big gear but eventually the shaft broke off because it is not made for such forces so I 3d printed a second big year with a hole in the middle for which I got myself this 8 millimeter fake threaded rods after creating a shorter piece of its I secured it to the gear with nuts pushed it once again through one bigger ball bearing into huge ad hand crank to its this time though it felt a lot more stable and thus I pushed its shaft to the second ball bearing and secured both mounting plates to one another with m4 screws and nuts to complete the system I removed the m3 screw that holds the generators rotor in place executed to the gear system will be longer screw which goes through the second ball bearing and as you can see by turning the hand crank the generator duster on four times faster than how we crank which means this mission was a success but sadly by adding the USB tester as well as the power bank you can see that I probably should have chosen a bigger amplification factor because it was quite hard to charge up the power bank continuously it would still be suitable for emergency situations though and if you got an electric drill on your hands then you can truly charge up your power bank easily here needless to say though this gear system looks a bit ridiculous because of its size which I can totally understand and that is why I designed the second gear train in fusion 360 year after 3d printing it's and once again assembling it's in pretty much the same way as before you can see that we still got the same amplification factor than before and the generator still outputs pretty much the same power but the size of this new gear train is much smaller in comparison to the old one the reason is that we are basically using four Geass with the first pair having a t factor of 18 to 9 and the second pair also having a t factor of 18 to 9 in this case the T factor of both stages gets multiplied which once again leaves us with an amplification factor of 4 of course you could add even more chaos to the system to get ridiculous factors but then again you would also increase the mechanical losses through friction and with that being said I hope you enjoyed this video if so don't forget to Like share subscribe and hitting the notification below stay creative and I will see you next time