The new 11m mast is up and performing it job of keeping the mill up in the sky and allowing me to sleep well at night.
The 115mm pipe sits in a 'boot' which has all the extra bits welded onto it to make a tilt over tower - the pivot and socket for the gin pole and a hole in the bottom for the generator cables to come out of. The pole is not fixed into the boot, gravity is all that holds it in!
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As can be seen, there are two fixings, the bottom one is the pivot, the top one I doubt I will use as if the guys fail then nothing is going to hold it up!
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The pivot pin is a length of galvanised irrigation pipe, located with a couple of 6mm rebar 'R' clips and taking the whole weight onto a couple of railway sleepers (so called, actually 250x100mm posts) that are sunk 1.6m into the ground.
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The cutout switch and the rectifiers are mounted on one of the sleepers.
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With the gin pole slotted in, you can see how it goes together for raising and lowering
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The gin pole has a 6mm HT wire rope going up the middle to connect to one of the guy wire turnbuckles to provide the lift from the horizontal up to about 60 degrees
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To allow the guy wire to move away from the gin pole as the mast gets towards the vertical, the connection has to be slackened off - the wire rope up the inside of the gin pole allows this by slackening the clamp at the botton of the gin pole
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A turn of 5mm HT wire rope making sure we have belt and braces on the guy wire adjusters. Each of the 4 guy wires has a turnbuckle in the same relative place, one of which has the gin pole attached to it during raising and lowering
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Originally using the fence posts as the guy anchors, a few calculations showed that in excess of 400kg of deadweight would be much better.
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If the 12mm rebar in the concrete fails then there is a turn of 5mm HT wire rope tying the guy back to the fence post.
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Hard work, even with the 5 to 1 ratio of the winch, to get the pole up.
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Since the raising side of the mast doesn't have its guy wire thimble directly through the anchor, double shackles for a restfull nights sleep
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1946kb in 12 pictures all 800x600, Our poster here with 22 storys and 9 diaries should know the rules, nice bunch of work tho... If you resize them and replace the exact name images as they exist now in your files, and post a comment saying you've done so, I will restore your post exactly as it was w/o this message.
Photo Size is limited to 150K bytes and/or 640x480.. Please resize your photos before posting them, whether they on our server or yours. If you post large images, it causes problems for other users; Please review Frequently Asked Questions DanG
