Help needed with Hyde Generator

[Steven Dufresne]

A very nice link. It explains it well. If both discs are balanced
off the shaft, and then assembled, you may do O.K. Sometimes
shafts can have slag inclusions within them which will cause
out of balance effects. You are planning to run at a heck of a pace,
but if you start from zero, and slowly work up the speed, you can't
go too far wrong.

That was possible with my vacuum cleaner motor but this grinder motor quickly goes to around 3000 RPM
when first turned on. It may be the electronics or it may be the motor. I'll have a look. I'd certainly like to
start at 0. If you look closely at the youtube video I'd posted:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WR8U6T9Q0tc
starting at around 3:56 in you can see the quick ramp up. Maybe with the high voltage turned on before startup, i.e. the only load I can see, the ramp up will be slower.

I suspect that you may want to take the shaft and assembled discs in to a balancing specialist at some point.

Be ready for the possibility that you may be asked to install two
extra (small) discs on the shaft to carry counter balancing weights.

That may be difficult given that most of the shaft is in the motor itself. For that I'd have to go back to the vacuum cleaner motor arrangement (first post in this thread) but with a straight non-conductive shaft and everything balanced, that would be possible. I do like using the grinder motor if only because it's what's done in the Hyde patent and the first rule of replication is "First replicate exactly."
-Steve
http://rimstar.org   http://wsminfo.org
[EDIT]
PS. I had enough time today to remove the wheel guards, separate the motor from the base and do some modifications which will allow me to reattach the gaurds despite some cutting I'll have to do to them (should I ever want to use it as a grinder again.) Tomorrow I'll cut the guards, looks like a hack saw will do it easily, and start working on a way to attach the motor to the test frame (same one as in the photo in the first post in this thread.) See attached photo for current state.

[Paul-R]

It might be an idea to mount the equipment right up against a wall
with no doors or windows in the walls at right angles. Possibly even
rawlplug the equipment to a shelf on the wall, with the plane of the
perspex discs parallel to the wall.

Like that, if the perspex discs fly apart, they will be unlikely to hurt
you or anyone else, or damage equipment. The danger plane, i.e.
the plane of the discs, will be empty.

[Steven Dufresne]

For these high RPM tests I usually stand behind the 1/4" thick plexiglas barrier in this photo of a different experiment:
http://rimstar.org/sdprop/rot/rotchgcyl1/26_rotchgcyl1_1st6000RPM_test3_annotated.jpg
The (1) is at the top left corner and the (14) is at the bottom right. I'll likely enclose the whole thing in a similar plastic enclosure or two in case the sectors fly off, through, besides being glued, they'll also be strapped onto the centre shaft. Don't worry, I'm sufficiently cautious (chicken.)
-Steve
http://rimstar.org   http://wsminfo.org

[BEP]

@Steven

Please be aware your device will have 'critical speeds'. These points you must ramp through quickly - up or down.
Balancing at speeds of zero, running, and those in between will be different. I have plenty of experience with rotating machinery. You won't catch me in the danger plane with only 1/4 inch Plexiglas between me and this machinery.

May sound silly but I suggest you put it up on a solid table and control it from under that table.

Sorry to butt in but plastic disks spinning at 10k in a wooden frame looks like a problem to me.

[X00013]

I have to agree with BEP when it comes to safety, after his comment i went back and looked at your first pic of the disk size and the speeds, drop a grinder at 4k and it will scare the hell out of you doing major fubar to everything around it, check your tip speed and prepare for the worst accordingly, maybe get a stress test sheet from the plastics manufacturer,  10,500 rpm times 34.5 inches per revolution comes up 362250 inches that the tip travels per minute, but lets divide by 12 to change inches to feet with 30,187.5 feet tip travel per minute. 30,187.5 feet per minute divided by 5280 feet per mile becomes 5.72 miles tip travel per minute. Most people are more familiar with miles per hour so multiply 5.72 miles per minute by 60 minutes per hour to arrive at 343.2 miles per hour tip speed. double the rpm and you could have micro sonic booms in your workshop ( which i think would be really cool) yet very unsafe,  and good luck