Still Not 100%

Today was so rough. I woke up feeling worse than yesterday, but better than Tuesday. Stool was loose, slight fever/chills were still existent overnight and I could tell I was still dehydrated. I started some traveler's diarrhea medicine which seems to have done the trick, but it made me very sleepy today and I also had a bad headache that I couldn't take ibuprofen for because it would potentially react with the other medicine. Either way I powered through and went to the shop.

Resin on the floor from the vacuum seal failure

Today, we got back to a spilled resin set up for the second blade. Basically, the resin tubes that helped with the vacuum seal broke off of the set up with the resin, so there was no more seal. The remaining resin spilled out and the mold may not have dried. It was salvageable still because it wasn't completely dry, so I'm pretty sure they redid the vacuum sealing process to try and pull the resin throughout the whole rotor. I would guess they will crack the mold open on Monday and see how it worked out. 

Arduino/Raspberry Pi learning station

While the others dealt with that scenario, those of us who worked on the stator yesterday got to take apart our mold today and see how the resin set on the bottom layer. It looked pretty good so we went onto the next step. We also got a crash course in the Arduino and Raspberry Pi technologies that WindAid is starting to use to do some remote sensing. We were allowed to work on that today as well. 

Stator after we opened the mold

The next stator part was to strip the loose wires and connect the appropriate coils to each other. The way the coils worked out were choosing 3 coils closest to the mold hole for the three phase wires, choosing 3 ground wires, and connecting opposite coils in the mold together to ensure an electric current will flow. We spent all of today stripping wires and connecting some of the wires. We ended the shop day early after lunch, which was excellent, because I truthfully would've asked to leave the latter half of the day to sleep because I was so tired and didn't accomplish much today.

Lunch today was excellent, and I'm so bummed I was almost too sick to eat. It was a chicken stir fry with rice dish that was so good, but I couldn't eat that much of it.

We got back around 3pm and I slept for about 2 hours which was great for my recovery. The others either went back to Huanchaco for the beach, or went to a local fruit market to get some exotic fruits. I wish I could've went because I saw photos of the amazing destination and it looked incredible, but I definitely needed to sleep. A bunch of the volunteers and people from the shop went and played soccer when they got back as well. I opted out of playing due to my lack of energy still. It also was sprinkling when they went to play soccer. Rain down here is so uncommon, but it wasn’t anything sizable.

Next week I believe we're in Playa Blanca doing turbine maintenance! I'm not sure when we leave for Playa Blanca, but when we get back into the shop, our next step is to solder our connected stator wires and then pour the rest of the resin to finish the stator.

This weekend we've decided to do some local archaeological sites. I believe we are visiting Chan Chan and Hucas del Sol tomorrow and then going back to Huanchaco beach on Sunday. I hope I'm better tomorrow, and less sluggish to be able to fully experience everything we do this weekend. 

It's one of the long term volunteer's birthdays today, so a lot of the guys and some girls are going to go out and celebrate. As much as I would love to, it would be best for my dehydration and exhaustion not to, so I think I'm staying in so I can be fresh tomorrow! We're having a BBQ tomorrow afternoon too! The BBQ excuse is because of the long term volunteer's birthday and one of the short term volunteers birthday's which is on Sunday as well.