My ten footer has been up since earth day. Time to take it down and do some inspections and finish packing my electronics into a steel control panel.
One of the first problems I knew I had is that my side anchors are messed up on my tilt up tower. Let me try to describe in words as I have to pictures. My tilt-up tower when in the down position points east. Side anchors would be North and South. My pulleys are hooked to the West anchor and I pull in the direction of West. I released the tension of the turnbuckles on my side anchors about as loose as I could. While lowering the tower, I had to loosen the cable clamps twice as the tension was extremely tight as I lowered. Upon investigation, my side anchors are too far west of a centerline running through the North-South plane of the tower.
Idealy, in a flat world, the side anchors would be on this centrline plane. I am considering actually putting new anchors offset to the east of this centerline so while lowering the tower, the only thing that can happen is the cables would go slack.
Anybody see a problem with this?
As for the blades, two of the three are in good shape, the third has a crack about 12" from the tip and must be replaced. After reading the article Dan B posted on maintenance, which I can't find anywhere on this board, I checked my blade tracking and discovered I have one blade tracking out 1" and one blade tracking in 1", making a 2" offset. Blades were 2 x 8 pine.
I have been observing weird tail tracking in good wind. After inspecting on my test stand, my tail has got to be at an angle of 30 degrees to the centerline of the hu shaft. I know it's supposed to be 10 degrees, but I am way off. I am thinking about welding a piece of keystock as a stop to get this back in the neighborhood of 10 degrees.
I knew my air gap was wide. I wanted to be on the conservative side. I will lower the gap on the back rotor. When I do this, I have a large gap on the front rotor. The only way I can thik of to reduce the gap is to grind some off the jam nuts. My stator ended up being a bit shy of 1/2". I think I used some of that funky undersized 1/2" plywood for the stator mold.
All in all, I have been pretty happy with the performance of the last two months, I figure a little tweaking will just make things better.
Any suggestions?