Monday we got all the trees cleared. We arranged for our good friend/neighbor Burt to come up on Wed to help dig holes for the anchors. First we had to go down to his place and work on the backhoe a bit - over the winter one of the connections on the 'ignition switch' (diesels don't really have an ignition system) had corroded such that he wasn't getting power to the solenoid in the injector pump that let the fuel go. Easy fix - Burt drove his backhoe up here and we got started around 9AM.
Burt's great, an expert with his old John Deere. He's lived up here in his cabin since I was a small child. He's done lots of backhoe work and construction up here over the years.
Sure beats a shovel! Especially up here where things are very rocky and very dry right now. In about 2 hours he got holes dug for all my anchors and the base of the tower.
I know this disturbs some folks.. but this old Okeef-Merit generator is really heavy junk in my yard. It doesn't run (it did, but had lots of problems) and it really sucks down fuel. What better resting place for an old gas-hog generator than at the anchor of a wind turbine tower?
Rest in peace!
The backhoe work was done by noon. It was about 100 deg F up here so we went fishing. I'd kind of showed Maya how to 'hand fish' the day before - since there's no pizza on Thursdays I figured maybe she'd catch us supper.
Got one! If only she can get it out from under the rock! Fishing poles are kind of boring and don't do anything to cool you down on a hot day!
She fought this one for about 10 min.
After a while Maya had caught 6, I caught 3. We had a tasty fish fry for supper.
Today we built the base for my tower. It's perched on 36" long sections of H beam. The pivot is 4" diameter sched 40 pipe that turns over 3.5" sched 80 pipe. We welded plates to the pivot to accomodate sleeves/clamps that will hold the tower and the jin pole.
Another picture of it. One one side there's a hole so we can insert 2.5" sched 40 pipe into the pivot. We'll assemble the tower/jin pole on its side, and then we can insert a jin pole in the pivot to raise the jin pole!
We also made 20 of these guy wire brackets. We'll weld these to the couplers. It will take two of these with a bolt through the holes to hold each guy wire on the tower. It'll probably all make more (or less) sense in a week or two.
We had so much fun last two days I figured I'd best it now or I'd be overwhelmed next monday...
