I did a bit of research on how to best protect the steel parts from the elements. You can actually just leave the steel bare and let it rust. They say that it will not affect the performance in any way and will still last plenty long. Some people just spray the parts with a can of spray paint, and that prabably works fine too. Even better is to use these high quality industrial epoxy paints (like you find on street light poles), but I found from calling around that they were very toxic and expensive.
I think everyone would agree that the very best way to protect the steel parts is to have them powder coated, which is an electrically charged polyester powder that gets baked onto the steel at around 500 degrees. Anyway, I found a guy with rediculously good prices. He said he would powder coat 4 or 5 wind turbines for his minimum invoice amount of $100! That is half the price of doing the high end epoxy paint. So, I picked a textured green color and did both turines for this price…and he would have done like 5 or something for this price if I had that many! I went ahead and coated both turbines and they turned out great and look very professional. I am very pleased.
One thing to remember next time is to make sure to have the steel disks for the magnet rotors powder coated before placing the magnets and resin on them. You can’t powder coat the finished magnet rotors because the resin would melt and the magnets would demagnetize from the high temperatures. So I decided to paint the magnet rotors using a steel primer and spray enamel paint. I think this will hold up fairly well for these parts.
