Generating Wind Power | Live Free or Die

We got a whole slew of scrap line around our property, and we happen to have a treadmill that we could probably salvage the motor from and, uh, use it for a generator. Whoa, crazy! That was nuts! That was easy!

What are you doing? I'm taking this thing apart. That was crazy! There we go. I love taking things apart, don't you? Motors need to eat electricity to spin and turn stuff. Then if you physically turn a motor backwards with wind power, hand power, or water power, it creates electricity to recharge the battery on their truck.

Tony and Amelia's wind turbine needs to crank out nearly 15 volts of electricity, enough to power more than 16-watt light bulbs. Look at it! It's working! The next step in this jigsaw puzzle would be the shaft. Let's go search through our junk piles.

You mean our property? Yeah, we're looking around under the house and we find a few different sizes of PVC that can be kind of put together. Woo! Now we're cooking with PVC! Then we found a long metal rod to connect our motor to our turbine. Cool! Look at that!

Now, what we need to do is make the blade component of the turbine. That should do it! Our next step is to build the turbine. That's the part that actually is being spun by the wind, so we need to find something we can use to make the blades of the turbine.

Uhh, huh! Here it is! We end up finding snow shovels. Oh, nice! I might have a design in my brain. We're going to see how badass of a junk wizard I am! Time to crank it up a notch. Got it!

Wow, look at that! My masterpiece! Look at that freaked-out contraption! That's from the future. I think the cool thing about found materials is they're free, but sometimes they're the wrong dimension or a little discombobulated.

You got to get pretty creative to figure out how to get all the found materials to work with one another. That was a tight one! Yeah, we're ready to install it! So the next step is to get this big crazy wind turbine up on top of the tower. That's going to be a little bit dangerous, but think I'm up for it!