Скачать или смотреть I Made a Gingerbread Wind Turbine that Generates Electricity

Did you ever wonder if it was possible to make a functional, electricity-generating wind turbine out of edible materials? No? Well I am going to show you anyway.

I have tried to show here the trial and error process of engineering pretty much any new technology. To keep the video length reasonable, I had to cut a lot of the "error" parts though. I probably tried twice as many ideas as what I showed. Some of the ones that missed the cut:
3 different recipes of toffee were tried. The first was butter toffee which is more delicious, but also easier to break. It kept on splitting (butter and sugar separate into oily clumps).
I made a cardboard tower to test if it would block the wind too much, because I was worried about handling the real tower too much. That was a totally unnecessary worry, the tower is basically bomb proof! I also made two slimmer back up towers, because the wide tower did block the wind and reduce the power a bit. But I didn't need to use the slim towers, so I kept them for eating.
I tested in 5 different locations, always trying to find the best wind. The wind speed was SO much more important than the blade shape. The difference in performance between the slim toffee coated blades and the thick icing coated blades was the same as the difference from only 1 or 2 m/s faster wind speed. So I guess that really makes it clear why people are so keen to install wind turbines offshore where the wind is consistently fast.
I tried to attached the blades to the hubs using candy canes, but they were too thick and broke pretty easily.
I tried to make a silicone mould instead of the horrible fondant moulds, but the only silicone I could get (from the supermarket because the hardware shop was closed due to Covid lockdown) cured at 1-2mm per day, so that was too slow to get it to work. Also, my trial silicone mould stuck to the plastic, I couldn't get it off cleanly.

And a fun fact that I had to cut: my mum told me that there is a bridge in Greece that is rumoured to have been made with 20,000 egg whites as adhesive. It's Plaka bridge, and I actually visited it with my parents while my mum was researching a book she wrote about my grandfather who was an engineer fighting behind enemy lines in Greece: https://amzn.to/3aujgBI


The generator comes from the STELR wind energy kit, available here:
https://stelr.org.au/stelr-modules/wi...