Lifting the Tower

Yesterday evening Brian and his dad were finally ready to test lifting the windmill tower. They put a lot of thinking, engineering, and especially time into this project (and it's not finished yet!).

A couple of days ago they first had to lift the tower up and attach it at the pivot point, then get all the hydraulics hooked up. They rented an extending fork lift to get it into place.

They were putting the finishing touches up before the test when the dark storm clouds started to move in (and our weather radio starting to go off with severe thunderstorm warnings).

Brian's sister Jana and her family are here for the summer, plus his other sister Julie has also been here for the weekend. We made a tailgate party out of it!

Here our two little blondies -- Hayley with her cutie-pie cousin Olivia (who will be turning 2 in a couple of weeks).

Part of lifting the tower involves first raising / sliding the top section of the base where the pivot point is. This allows the base to be lifted over the bolts at the bottom and then lowered back down. They used two jacks at the bottom to slide it up -- you can see how far it slid by the unpainted portion.

On the first attempt to lift it, they only went up a couple of feet so they could reposition the blocks and finish jacking it up all the way.

Then, they tried again. This time they got it up quite a ways further before they realized one of the hyrdraulic hoses was too short and so they had to stop and lower it back down.

Here is a video clip of the lifting in action!

There is still work to do (and wind turbine isn't even attached yet), but we are making progress. Exciting times!