Assembling and Testing a DIY Jet Turbine

What happened

After many months of painstaking work, [AlfMart CNC Garage] over at YouTube has finally reached the stage where he can fully assemble his DIY jet turbine and commence testing. Even if deceptively simple devices, just the starting mechanism turned out to be a challenge.

Due to the extreme conditions that these jet turbines operate under, tolerances are narrow, and many of the materials require careful selecting and testing. Fortunately this is not true for the outer casing, which is cobbled together from a commercial gas cylinder and a children’s steel drinking bottle that so happened to have the right dimensions.

From there the parts get increasingly more specialized, down to the carefully balanced rotor . Assuming everything was done right up till this point, the first start-up will mean a happily roaring turbine and not a deafening explosion followed by a cloud of shrapnel.