Jonathan, Brittany, Ryan, and the boys and I spent about nine hours at the World Hunger Relief farm today trying to get our wind turbine tower raised. Cole, Anna, AJ, JT, and Katy also helped out too. Thank you to everyone for the hard work! We are tired, dirty, and sunburned.
The vertical pole is called a jin pole. Its purpose is to provide a lifting mechanism so that the tower can be raised without a crane. It alows us to use a tractor to pull the tower up.
Here you can see the 41 foot tower laying down, and the jin pole being prepared for the lift.
We call this the pivoting base. It's essentially a big hinge where the tower and the jin pole meet. It sits on the concrete slab we installed in the last few weeks.We were able to get the tower raised to nearly vertical, but some of the cables pulled too tightly and we had to lower it back down. Here is a low quality video of the tower raising halfway. We had to stop because the tractor we used to pull it stalled.
We restarted the tractor and kept pulling. The tower made it to a near vertical position, but several of the guy wires were pulled too tightly and we couldn't lock it down. At the end of the day we lowered it back down until we can leave it in a safe condition.
Ryan and Jono attach cables to the tower flanges.
Tower flange and cables.
At each of the four compass points, we have a ground anchor connected to three guy wires. Here you see one of these anchors with three sets of guy wires coming from the turbine. Are you impressed with our handiwork with turnbuckles, thimbles, carabiners, and U-clamps. (We now speak all the lingo.) Looks pretty professional for a bunch of amateurs, eh?
Brittany and Anna are being a dead weight on the end of the tower as we hammer the other end. (It looks like they're not working but they are!)
1 comment:
That sounds like a lot of (hard) fun.
Where's the farm? That would definitely be a worthwhile investment of time...
The whole Ender's Quartet is rather awesome. Speaker for the Dead is probably my favorite.
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