Final Day in the Shop

Today was the final day in the shop for those who aren't taking a weekend trip!

Sanding the blade

I started out today sanding one of our blades. This blade had a resin, fiberglass mixture to it and needed to be shaped! This included shaping the leading edge and the trailing edge of the wind turbine blade. It was fun I spent most of the morning on this task and the once lunch time came around, I changed tasks.

After lunch, I helped with turning some more coils and watched a blade be balanced.

Blade balancing test

To balance the blade, it is mounted to a typical tower set up and spun. While spinning, we look for imbalances that indicate one side is heavier than the other. In our case, there was one that was heavier than the other. We then proceeded to add some washers to the part of the blade that was under weight. Adding washers, with tape, and moving them around occasionally helped create a guide to balance the blade. Once the blade was balanced, a hole was drilled in the place of the washers and filled with a lead material of the same weight as the washers.

Also, today was time to make the wind turbine tail which includes a WindAid sticker on a board. I didn't participate in making this, but it was super cool.

Wind turbine tail

It was a bittersweet day in the shop because we will not be back to that shop anymore. This also means we are 3/4 of the way done with the program which is pretty sad. However, we have big plans for the weekend and then in Playa Blanca all next week.

My new timeline is as follows: travel to Huaraz this weekend. While in Huaraz, hike to the Guinness World Records Tallest Installed Wind Turbine that WindAid Installed in 2013. This wind turbine is located at 4,882 meters above sea level (Trujillo is at 30ish meters above sea level). While there, we will also visit the Pastoruri Glacier, one of the only tropical glaciers I'll likely see in my life. The next day we will visit Laguna 69, a glacier fed lake that is a bright blue turquoise color. We leave for Huaraz at 9:30am tomorrow and arrive back to Trujillo at 5am on Monday morning. From there, we depart for Playa Blanca on another bus at 7am. When we finish our installation and other maintenance in Playa Blanca, we will depart at a TBD time Friday to return and be able to get people to the airport to get flights out. I depart at 11pm on Friday for an 11am arrival in Toronto on Saturday. This means I won't be able to post any of my video logs until Saturday 01/28/2017 in the late afternoon or evening. I'm assuming I'll sleep most of Saturday when I return, so stay tuned until then.

Thanks for following along so far! The next few days are going to be exhaustive, but I'm super excited to keep exploring Peru! Until next Saturday, Adios!