Recovery!

I woke up today feeling so much better than yesterday. I got some very much needed rest and continued with plenty of fluids today.

I chose to do relatively the same thing as yesterday, so more coils for me! We had two done when we left yesterday and one that needed to be weighed because the scale was broken. We needed six coils to complete the stator. One of the Australian guys (Henry) and I spent all day turning coils. In the morning, he turned one and it came out to 408 grams which was actually usable! The other coil that needed to be weighed was 430 grams! Then it was my turn, and mine was 488 grams, so I unwinded mine and Henry started a new one. His ended up being 482 grams, which was too heavy (limit is 450). Then I did my unwound wire and got it down to 472 grams, but still not low enough. Henry unwound his and ended up at 442 grams! Which was indeed usable. Then I unwound my wire and ended up finally with 434 grams! With that last coil we had all six coils for our first stator! We found it was a lot easier to wind the already wound coils because they are more malleable, which I wondered if that decreased any properties of the copper at all, but they definitely encouraged it so we went with their suggestions.

The coil contraption! This video is from yesterday of the girl who did the 430 gram coil!

At that point it was almost 4pm and we then prepped the stator mold for fiberglass and resin so it could set overnight. This included waxing the mold, kind of like prepping a cake pan for baking with Crisco, then adding an alcohol mixture and letting it dry. This process was used for the rotor molds as well. Once it was dry, we checked the weights of the coils again, cut the circular fiberglass piece and then poured the resin in the mold. We then laid the circle of fiber glass on it and soaked it with the resin before carefully placing the coils on the mold. The coils, since they had different weights, needed to be arranged specifically so they would have the same amount of electrical effect when it's spinning. We lined up some of the highest weights with the lowest weights and then the in between ones were a mix of higher to lower weighted coils. After, we had to bolt the mold shut and make it level so it could set. The others in the last few days set the magnets for the rotor disk and also poured the resin in the second mold. It seems as if we are pretty well on schedule or even ahead!

Some things to note as I see them: there is a Praxair plant here that we pass every time we go to the shop! The people here call foreigners "gringos" so when we got in a taxi to leave the shop (the beast only fits about 9 comfortably, but the record is 15 people) one of the coordinators said, "Don't let the taxi man gringo you! You can always get it cheaper!"

That being said, on the topic of taxis, we went to Huanchaco, a beach, last weekend and fit 6 people in one taxi, which was pretty remarkable. Our landmark for getting back to the volunteer house is the Chifa Chong Wa, which is a Chinese restaurant chain on the corner of our road. It's always interesting trying to navigate the taxis when you barely have enough Spanish to communicate around. All of the vehicles here are manual, not sure if I mentioned that, but the drivers shift extremely smoothly. But there's also lots of speed bumps all over to regulate speed around here since there's usually no posted limit. It's very interesting the skill of all of these drivers, especially because of the insane traffic.


The gas prices here are a bit higher than home at about $4 a gallon. The Australians were saying that's incredibly cheap because they surely pay more than that per gallon. It's interesting how they judge their units here too because some gas stations have prices per gallon, and some have prices per liter.

I really like that they the use metric system here because it is so much easier, but it's sometimes difficult to immediately understand that 20 degrees Celsius is 68 degrees Fahrenheit.

I have yet to see any fire trucks, or stations yet. I saw an ambulance that was pretty similar to our ambulances, but no real fire trucks. The police here is mainly in the forms of security on street corners, but you do occasionally see a police officer.

Overall, today was so much better for me and we continue to have excellent conversation with everyone about their home countries. It turns out I was given false information and the girl who I thought was from Sri Lanka is actually from South Africa as well!

I'll log off for now, but the plan is to do more video blogs when I won't have access to wifi. That way I won't have to recall everything by typing and it won't be as "in the moment" as it could've been. Tomorrow will mark a quarter of my trip down, which makes me pretty sad, but also very excited because we are that much closer to finishing our wind turbine and installing!