This Summer - fall - Winter I worked quite a bit on my tail. After several times of up and down with the tower I ended up with the eight foot long angle irons cut down to six foot. I moved the plywood tail to seven foot, so I still have some length to it. I cut the bottom hinge off and moved it 1/2" to make it more straight up and down. I raised it last week with four inches of snow on the ground. I had to snow blow the back yard so I could use my van to raise it. We have had some good wind and the tail furls most of the time between 30 - 40 amps. The chain that holds it in it's normal position is slack at most of the time around 20 amps. With all the trees around the turbulence makes it furl different with different gales of wind. I still seen it once hit 60 amps but I think it is the way the wind hits it that it didn't want to furl. With all the turbulence it folds up and unfolds a lot. It doesn't stay furled long because my wind comes in waves. I don't like how it sits on the tower. It's not balanced. The center of gravity isn't where the yaw bearing is. It is closer to the tail side. I think it would work better if the machine sat balanced at the yaw bearing, but it works a lot better than it did before.
I took off my nose cone last spring and didn't put it back on till last week. I wanted to see the difference. Mostly because of rotor noise. I did notice a big difference in the start up and stopping. with the cone off it would come to a stop quite often, and in very little wind it would spin slower. With the cone on it rarely ever stops and will spin faster when there seems to be no wind. I still don't think it contributes much to power but it is nice to have the blades spinning when the wind comes, and to have it accelerate a bit faster too.
From a previous post on the board about the bicycle computer I decided to get one for myself. While I had all my wires out of the tower for twist inspection I added speaker wire, and a steel cable to hang the wires with. The speaker wire hooks to a sensor that runs the bicycle computer. I put the magnet for the sensor at 10" from center in the root of the blade. This worked good because I could hook the other side of the sensor up directly to a 5/8" double nut on the stator bracket. No extra hardware was needed other than the extra nut. I found that it worked with 260' of wire and extension cords hooked to it. So now I have the computer in the garage by the controls and gages.
I also sanded the outer layer of glass off my magnet rotors. I could see water around the surface of the magnets and the glass was bubbling a bit. I painted them up and closed the air gap up to 11/16". I was at about 3/4". It slowed the rotor down quite a bit.
