Wind Turbine Project Part 7

Saturday the boys and I spent about five hours at the World Hunger Relief farm on the foundation and anchors for the wind turbine. David, Brittany, and Ryan met us and we made great progress. Here we are driving one of the anchors into the ground with a sledgehammer.

Here you see the tail end of one of the guy wire anchors after driving it into the ground. The anchor is about four feet underground now.

Fortunately we had a very long water hose for mixing the concrete. Ryan is the brown dot at about 2 o'clock. There is a spigot out in the field for watering the farm's produce.

The boys worked very hard tearing open sacks of concrete and mixing it with the water. Jono worked especially hard with his little shovel, and stirred every single bag.

The network of rebar that will hold the tower base.

The four threaded rods will protrude out of the concrete and will form a mount for the base plate. The wood will be removed after the concrete sets.

Here you see the concrete just poured and covering the rebar.

Jono, David, and I at the end of the day: 1120 pounds of wet concrete, lots of sweat and a little sunburn. Good times.

This is the base of our tilt-up tower. One boss will hold the tower, one will hold the gin pole. The base plate will sit on the four threaded bolts you saw set into the concrete (after we remove the wood).