Brian’s Morning Newsletter March 19th 2009

Good Morning
I’m getting a nice late start this morning, didn’t wake until 6:30 AM.  Yesterday, we worked on the wind turbine tail piece. I spied our neighbor heading up the hill driving an ATV and scrambled to catch him. I wanted to talk to him using a couple of pieces of his scrap pipe, however by the time I made it over to the fence he was already up into the forest. It was a sunny, warm morning and  decided wait in the meadow for him to return. The pipe we need is for the tail section of the wind turbine. According to the book a 1 1/4 inch ID (inside diameter) pipe fits easily around a 1 inch ID  pipe.

I could hear the neighbor’s ATV putting along  on the hill and  I had the Home Brew Wind Power book along with me to show Ignacio  what we were building. It being so nice outside I found a big tree along the fence to lean against and sat down. Our old dog Cujo showed up a few minutes later nudging me off my resting place with a puppy-like playfulness. I gave old Cuggie a big hug since I was already on the ground and we both lie in the deep grass for ten or fifteen minutes.Yes it was as blissful as it sounds.

When the neighbor finally putt-putted down the hill  we got  together in an over the fence  country style chat that ended several minutes later with Ignacio telling me, "Sure, let’s go take a look at the iron pile together." We found four sections of pipe, one is 2 inch diameter and eight feet in length, which will be used for either the tower top section, or  a floor stand for the next phase of the  turbine assembly, installing the blades. We also picked out the inch and a quarter diameter pipe for the tail bearing and a eight foot length of one inch pipe for the tail frame. 

After we chatted about spring planting for another half hour, Ignacio said he had to get back to work fixing the fence where the elk have been tearing it up on a regular basis. I hopped the fence with my prizes on my shoulder.  By the time I got back to the shop the rest of the Tusas-folk were up and gathered in the yard by the shop. I tried to give a pep talk about getting serious about working together and mostly earlier in the morning, but it came out as a rant. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I thought, I am not disgruntled, but I have trouble getting the crew motivated in the morning and I was wanting to work in the shop and Jackson had his loafer/workers waiting for I don’t know what, I  couldn’t work like that.  

Finally, we got moving, and we stayed with it until 5:00 PM, right, a whole half day, wow! Nevertheless, by the time we called it a day, we cutout, sanded and oiled two, eleven inch diameter, half inch thick plywood disks for supporting the blades, cut and welded the steel pipe for the tail section. Yeah man, I don’t know about Kevin, but I am sore and tired this  morning. I guess carrying that iron pipe across the field must be why my legs ache, don’t know, but my back is talking to me too this morning. Now that the sun crested the ridge I’ll go out to the shop and take pictures of our work.

 
Blades laid out on work bench with the red painted iron disk on top of the plywood 11 inch disk on top of the blades.

Tail piece cut and welded, this was a fairly complicated part to cut out and build. Notice the half cutout pipe next to the orange welding stick clamp. This is the 1.25 inch pipe which fits over the 1 inch tail bearing pipe. The notch allows the tail to furl or fold in one direction 

Wind turbine with tail piece in place in unfurled position. In the above  image the tail is perpendicular to the blades. In this turbine tail position the blades will face the wind. The tail will normally want to stay in this position because of gravity, however should the wind increase to 30 miles per hour the tail will begin to fold or furl causing the blades to move at an angle to the wind. As wind speed increases so does the furling action, untill the blades only have the sides exposed to the wind.

In the above image I’m holding the tail up which is the furled position, again gravity plays a big part in keeping the tail and the turbine facing the wind in most wind speed conditions

Above is an image of the front of the wind turbine with the tail in the natural unfurled position.

Finally this morning,  we thank Mackenzie Thatcher for the spool of copper wire he sent to us. I couldn’t believe when I saw the shipping manifest, shipping weight: 53 pounds of 14AWG! It’s exactly the wire gauge we used in our first 24 volt alternator.  This will build a lot of wind turbines Mack, thanks again, and do let me know if there is anything I can do for you.

Yours truly,

Brian Rodgers

 

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Yesterday’s quotes (I just noticed the title) "Your Quotes for 18 March 2009 – Wind"

Your Quotes of the Day for 18 March 2009

At one o'clock in the afternoon on this day in 1925 a
tornado, The Tornado, touched down at Ellington, Missouri.
The storm traversed southern Illinois and ended at
Petersburg, Indiana, 219 miles of destruction in three and a
half hours. Fatalities totaled 695, hospitals treated 2,027
injured persons, and 15,000 homes were destroyed at a cost of
$17 million. Not only was it the most severe tornado seen in
US history, in the era before radio and telephones were
common there was no warning those in the path. Todays quotes
are related to Wind of a less destructive nature.

                                       Van

___________________________________________________________ 

New! Improved! Interrupted!

Yesterday's mail went out in an our, but it took an other
hour and a half to get all the Yahoo mail delivered. The
backlog of undelivered copies is down to five, from five
thousand a day ago. Yahoo tells me they've made some changes,
so those delays may be behind us now. I even took a couple of
hours yesterday to start working on the redesign of the site.
All terribly exciting - in a terribly mundane sort of way.

___________________________________________________________ 

Today's Quotes:

Our lives are like a candle in the wind.
     - Carl Sandburg, 1878 - 1967

At this time of day, in the twilight, there is no wind. At
this time there is only power.
     - Don Juan to Carlos Castaneda

The winds and the waves are always on the side of the ablest
navigators.
     - Edward Gibbon, 1737 - 1794

What reason, like the careful ant, draws laboriously
together, the wind of accident sometimes collects in a moment.
     - Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, 1759 - 1805

The weather-cock on the church spire, though made of iron,
would soon be broken by the storm-wind if it ... did not
understand the noble art of turning to every wind.
     - Heinrich Heine, 1797 - 1856

A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man.
Kites rise against, not with the wind.
     - John Neal

—————-          

Corrections

my bad- sent local link instead of online:

http://www.newmexicocare.org/1pages/resources.html#rurren

sorry.

jc

At 08:43 AM 3/18/2009 -0600, you wrote:

Letters

our wind group has been trying to put some focus on local renewables efforts, and your new site is a perfect example of what we think is appropriate technology, so i added a link to your alt-energy/wind-power page from our Resources page.

file:///C:/z_Websites/NMCARE/1pages/resources.html#rurren
site’s looking way good, boss. keep it up.

================================
¡¡¡Radio Bemba Is In The House!!!
================================
My hero proof reader grammarian guru  made a booboo?
Dang, there bursts another bubble.
Brian
————-          

From Joe VonRodeck in Guam (beautiful shirt Joe, I had to share)

Here's my wedding shirt.  

http://www.barongatsaya.com/ProdImages/images/JB32A.jpg

    A barong Tagalog is very lightweight and worn untucked over an undershirt. 

    The Spaniards made Filipinos wear barongs untucked to distinguish them from the ruling class, its translucent fabric helping the Spaniards to see that the wearer was not bearing any weapon under the garment.

    Piña fabric - is hand-loomed from pineapple leaf fibers. And because Piña weavers in the Philippines are dwindling, its scarcity makes the delicate Piña cloth expensive and is thus used for very formal events.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

2009 March 19

Saturn: Moons in Transit
Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Acknowledgment: M.H. Wong (STScI/UC Berkeley), C. Go (Philippines)

Explanation: Every 14 to 15 years, Saturn’s rings are tilted edge-on to our line of sight. As the bright, beautiful rings seem to grow narrower it becomes increasingly difficult to see them, even with large telescopes. But it does provide the opportunity to watch multiple transits of Saturn’s moons. During a transit, a sunlit moon and its shadow glide across the cloudy face of the gas giant. Recorded on February 24, this Hubble image is part of a sequence showing the transit of four of Saturn’s moons. From left to right are Enceladus and shadow, Dione and shadow, and Saturn’s largest moon Titan. Small moon Mimas is just touching Saturn’s disk near the ring plane at the far right. The shadows of Titan and Mimas have both moved off the right side of the disk. Saturn itself has an equatorial diameter of about 120,000 kilometers.

 

Tomorrow’s picture:

equinox

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