So, after months of hard work the day of the first test is drawing close !
Yesterday more painting and I finally got around to dipping the stator in air dry varnish. That's nasty stuff. I've added a shot of the label on the canister to give you an idea how nasty.
Today we spent the whole day on assembling and testing the various components of the 2.4 KW machine.
A few minor gotchas caught us by surprise, I had completely forgotten about machining the support blocks to accept the new bearings (instead of the bushings that were in there before), and I had forgotten to put greasenipple holes in the tops of the 'large' blocks that have bushings in them. These issues were easily fixed.
One of the first things you notice about this machine is that it is heavy, really !
So far I could lift every piece on my own, no matter how far we had it together, but now that is simply impossible.
For tomorrow morning some minor linkages remain to be assembled, then it's off the tower to mount the thing. We really have to get on with this, we had 6" of snow today !
Pictures follow:
So, this is the stuff that you use to properly fix a set of laminations and coils if you do not have access to an oven for 'baking' the resin. Pretty nasty stuff, check the text on the canister. Good thing I already have a kid 
Preparations. I didn't want to get caught missing something once the stator was in the varnish bath so I made sure all the bits and pieces were lined up.
Dunk ! tilting the bucket side to side got the whole of the stator submerged and coated with varnish. Then I let it 'drip out' for an hour or so, then dry for a few hours and inside for another night of curing. By morning the varnish had hardened out quite well.
'Exploded View' of all the parts of the machine (bearings and bolts excepted), it gives you a pretty good idea of what goes where. The blades aren't in this picture because I did not have room enough and it's pretty logical where they will go
Johannes and Chris outside feeding a rope into the tower in preparation for the pulling of the cable. Here you can see how foul the weather is up here. The tower is up a bit, just outside of the picture frame:
Step one, the slip rings have been mounted:
Housing mated to tower adapter:
The blades with a first coat of white paint for UV protection on them:
Stator mounted on the housing, front view:
Left-Rear view:
Rotor mounted, front view:
Left-Front view:
Governor base and support blocks mounted front view:
Left-Front view:
Governor almost fully assembled, just a few linkages and the spring system need to be addded:
left-front view:
