What a storm!
It was totally stonishing. About 8mm of rain fell in about 30 minutes round about 22:30. It’s a long time since I’ve seen anything quite like it. I even had to close the roof windows as it was pouring in on me where I was sitting, and that’s not supposed to happen.
Mind you, it had been brewing all day. When the boulangère came by this morning, she mentioned that there might be a storm a little later. And it wasn’t long after that that we had the fist lightning flashes. They kept it up from about 12:00 until about 15:30 so I was pretty reluctant to go up on the scaffolding during that period, otherwise it would have been me frying tonight. That’s the one disadvantage of having metal planks.
When i considered it safe to do so, I went up there. Well, not quite – I had to round up all of the tools and fittings that I needed for the job. And that took several attempts to make sure that i had everything up there that I wanted. I drilled the hole, a 16mm hole, with the Hitachi battery-powered SDS drill and that went into the stone like a knife through butter. It’s a shame that the batteries are becoming tired in it now, because it really is one of the most useful tools that I have around here. I must sort out some new batteries for it.
Fitting my home-made eye wall anchor was straightforward – with a little persuasion from a hammer it went into the hole that I had drilled, but tightening it up was something else. With a little too much force, I reckon, I sheared off the wedge that splits the interior of the anchor. Then of course I couldn’t extract the broken one, and so I had to drill another hole and start again. This time I didn’t use quite so much force when tightening it, so I managed not to break it.
Fitting the turnbuckle was straightforward, but then actually fastening the guy wire was almost impossible as the length of the turnbuckle put it too far away from the scaffolding for me to reach it properly. I was lucky that the wire was quite long, as I was able to put a loop in the far end, pass the wire around the hook on the turnbuckle and then around a pivot (the framework upon which the wind turbine is mounted) and with a rope in the loop that I made, pull it back towards me again.
With it securely tied around the scaffolding, I could perform a major feat of gymnastics, balanced right on the edge of the scaffolding on the toes of one foot, and reach right out to the wire to fasten the wire rope ties (three of them) to hold the wire together.
Then dismantling the temporary fittings that I had made, I could tighten up the turnbuckle. And to my surprise, it pulled the wind turbine perfectly vertical instead of leaning over about 5° to the north.
All of this took me until about 18:20 and so for the remaining 40 minutes I did some (but not much) weeding in the vegetable plots. And as I knocked off, it started to rain. “Perfect timing!” I said to myself. And then we got the lot a few hours later.
i’m glad that I’ve fastened the wind turbine with a second guy wire. With just one, it was pulling it out of the vertical and of course, one isn’t very secure. Ideally it needs four and while I can think of a way to do the third one (and i might even do it some day) the fourth will be difficult. Nevertheless, progress has been made.
On Monday, I’ll start to attack all of the rest of the jobs that need to be done while I’m up there. Let’s see how long it takes me to finish them.
