A fun adventurous week, we had 7 folks up to attend a workshop. The goal... build a 12 foot diameter machine, then spend some time on towers hopefully! The next 3 pages cover the adventures over 6 days. We had Paul from Brooklyn NY, who spends his spare time in Rawanda helping to make life easier, Karana from Indiana who does work in Darfur, Steve who works in Tajikistan, Greg from Nebraska who might wind up in Nicaragua, Doug who lives near here and intends to install his own system, Jim from California and Don who's just moving into our own Canyon. Workshops like these are always interesting... we get folks from all over with different goals, political beliefs and skill sets. They're all pretty much forced to spend the week together, work hard, and make wind stuff happen. It reminds me a bit of certain 'reality TV shows' I've seen.
Most folks camped out for the week. They also had to bring their own food. We tried to provide water, shower, a kitchen etc...
The door got left open one day and we had a bear in the kitchen. Big thanks to DanF's dog Kodi for scaring it off before it dumped the fridge over and did more damage!
We had three different nights of party, which usually included a campfire and music. We had Greg and Scotty on drums, Bonnie on wash tub bass, Tim and Blake on Guitar/vocals and myself on mandolin. DanF showed up one night with a Dobro.
We had a similar workshop last August when we built a 12 foot diameter wind turbine, and a 65 foot tower. We installed the entire system, there is a story about that HERE. We took all the students to that site one day for lunch to see the 'goal'. The machine we built at the workshop was nearly identical.
The machine we planned to build at this workshop was identical to the one pictured above, it's a 12 foot diameter machine much like the one we built in Nicaragua a year and a half ago. This will be the 8th such machine we've made. So far, they seem to work well. The rest of this posting will involve how we spent 6 days... building the 12 foot wind turbine, building a 75 foot tower from 12 inch diameter tubing, and installing a 20 foot diameter wind turbine on it. You can read about my 20 foot diameter wind turbine here, and the one we installed HERE. There are a lot of pictures so the rest of this will be on other pages.
