Well my mate Dave turned up with his trailer with the 38m (120 foot) telescope mast - only 3 sections out of the 6 of it loaded - and now I know what order to wind the winches to get the beastie up.
Our first trial is at about 9m (30') just to see how it goes. I'm impressed!!
15km/hr breeze (according to my weather station) and it immediately leap off at 8 amps so a very useful 200w into the pair of 150amp/hr truck batteries I'm using on my 24v system.
I don't have any image resizing software immediately to hand but this is the test system until I put a couple of fences across the paddock for guy anchors during the winter (the ground is too hard at present).
I'm impressed by the lack of noise - just a very faint hum.
Bugs discovered so far are:
a slight imbalance, not sure if its static balance (which I tried pretty hard to get right), blade tip tracking or something else
the angle of the tail need to be another 10 or 15 degrees - its at about 100 at present and the tail is not pulling it round into the wind very well.
I forgot to grease the yaw bearing on assembly so its not turning into wind at low wind speeds very well. That relates to the point above. I'd like a bit of PTFE sheet as a bearing on the pole as well as some gunge...
