Three times in the last month we have written the same sentence: the blade sets are laser-cut from 1.2 mm high-strength aluminium. It is the kind of line that slides past a reader, because every manufacturer says something like it. So here is the machine that makes it true, the screen the operator is actually looking at, and an honest account of what owning the machine does and does not buy you.
A sheet part-way through a job. The long sweeping line across it is a blade profile; the scatter of bright beads is spatter thrown up at each pierce.
What the operator is actually looking at
The yellow lines on that screen are not the blade outlines. They are the path the cutting head will take, which is a different drawing and a more interesting one. Every white dot is a pierce — the moment the beam stops travelling and burns down through the sheet before the cut proper begins. Each of those little curls and hooks where a line joins the profile is a lead-in, a deliberate run-up so the pierce happens beside the part rather than on it.
That matters more for a turbine blade than for most parts. A blade is a long aerofoil strip, and the edge is the working surface. Put a lead-in on the wrong side and the pierce leaves a bead of resolidified metal exactly where the air is supposed to run clean. Nobody sees it in a photograph. It is there for the life of the machine.
One of our engineers on the control station. The panel on the right is assist gas, pierce settings and a thin-plate mode — the choices that decide whether an edge comes off clean.
The panel down the right-hand side is where the real decisions live: which assist gas, how the head pierces, whether the job runs in thin-plate mode, whether the machine finds the sheet edge before it starts. Aluminium is unforgiving here. Cut it with the wrong gas or too slowly and you get dross welded to the underside of every edge, which then has to be taken off by hand — or does not get taken off, and ships.
A laser does not cut a good part. A laser cuts exactly the part somebody told it to cut, including the mistakes.
Why we cut our own
There are three Atlas blade sets, and they are not three price points. The low-wind set runs 2–20 m/s for 2 kW peak, the moderate set 4–25 m/s for 3.8 kW, and the high-wind set 5–35 m/s for 4.5 kW in a six-blade arrangement built for exposed coastal sites. Three profiles, cut from the same stock, on the same bed.
Doing that in-house buys us one thing above all: we can change a profile without asking anyone's permission or waiting for anyone's lead time. A subcontracted blade is a purchase order and a six-week conversation. A blade on our own bed is a file, a test cut and an afternoon. When a customer sends us a season of measured wind and it does not match what our profiles assume, that gap is something we can act on rather than merely note.
The building the laser sits in. Not photogenic, and not the point — but it is ours, and the machine inside it is ours.
What a laser does not buy you
Now the part that keeps this honest. A fibre laser is not exotic. Plenty of fabricators have one, and owning it proves nothing on its own about how a turbine performs. The cut is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one: a perfectly cut blade with the wrong camber is a perfectly cut bad blade. What the machine gives us is control over the shape and repeatability between batches. It does not give us aerodynamics, and we would rather say so than let a photograph of an expensive machine do an argument's work.
Nor do we make everything. We do not smelt the aluminium. We do not make the magnets, the bearings or the semiconductors, and anyone who tells you they do at our scale is describing an ambition rather than a factory. What we do here is cut, form, wind, assemble and test. Where a part comes from outside, it comes from outside, and we will tell you which is which if you ask.
The photographs on this page are from our own production floor, taken this week and not staged for it. The blade figures are our own published specifications and are checkable on the product page. The screen is the machine's own control software, photographed mid-job — we have not tidied it up, which is why the error pane in the corner is still showing.