Well that didn't go well.
I've made another turbine with an aerodynamically better and much! stronger vane design, and today did another Definitely Not Destroying My Father's Back Windscreen speed trial. Thing didn't even make it to the testing road. Twice. First time the bracket holding it to the pole was too small and chewed the wood, so we had to head home and quickly make up a better one, second time the bloody bike axle bent.

It was vibrating and wobbling like crazy, I managed to put two of the vanes on rather unaligned and somehow that made the difference between the previous 80 km/h and everything's fine, and a bent axle at 65.
Bugger.

So I'm going to align and center the vanes like they should be, and add another three more on the bottom of the wheel so that the force is all sideways rather than levering the thing against its contact point.
This was always the plan anyway, I just didn't think it would be necessary for this test.

Tomorrow we're heading into Nelson to, amongst other errands, find a car alternator to be getting actual power of the thing, and an old vacuum cleaner motor to rev up and test the alternator. And a couple more spare bike wheels to mess up.
Also visiting the Nelson Environment Center, where I'm supposed to be giving a construction workshop on all this soon, if I can get the damn thing to work.

Doing stuff is haard.
Can't believe I went through almost two years of this malarky with the solarflower.