Vintage Windmill and Wind Generator Forum

Most cold galv paints are battleship gray so never match old galvanizing. I used a product from McMaster that is 95% zinc--heavy as heck, and you have to keep it constantly stirred. Comes out that battleship gray but I found that VERY lightly over-coating it with one of the shinier spray paint style ...

Well, after a long and hard build the 20' Samson is finally up at the museum. Lots of lessons learned in the process. For example, every single blade had 2 to 7 stress cracks that had to be drilled and welded up. The sheet thickness varied by almost 40% so we initially ground off the galvanizing but ...

Possibly post depression during WW2 when they dragged in a lot of females and teens to do the farm work? The clothing sort of implies that era but it's not specific enough to be sure. There were a ton of those programs to drag city kids out to farms to work as well as bring women out who might just ...

Thanks, All. I'll pass the info on.

There is no casting number on the back as mentioned by CTX so I'll assume it's not the stover version for now.

I don't even know if this one possible and I'm obviously no expert on windmills here-- Friend had a downed windmill when he moved into his place 40+ years ago. Head was already gone and he disassembled the tower to get it out of the way. Now that he's an old geezer looking into history of his place ...

Finally got the tail mounted on the 20' open gear Samson. You sure do discover all the weird foibles when re-assembling these old beasts--like having to tilt the tail in weird ways to slip under castings and such. One of the weirdest: On the lower tailbone where it bolts to the head casting...takes ...

The 20 footer we are "restoring" was over a 530' well IIRC. Their issue was not the pumping but the wind. Cows get cranky if you have too many windless days and the water goes away so they scabbed in an engine powered pump jack for intermittent use. The same well is solar today. Edit correction: 565 ...

I went out to the parts and checked why something so obvious had thrown me off kilter. When the crew disassembled the tail from the head castings, they bolted the vertical brace to the angle brace and tightened it up all the way--so it looked like that's the way it came off the machine. Those braces ...

Thanks---that helps explain something. The casting is actually part of the tail swivel and when the crew disconnected the tail, they had to pull that apart so wired things on the tail in place just for transport. That really solves my dilemma! I was all twisted up that someone lost a casting but ...

I was hoping someone could help with information regarding a missing casting from our 20' open gear Samson. I know that size isn't in everyone's backyard so had hopes that someone might have similar on a smaller sized unit. We appear to be missing the casting shown in the red circle. It connects the ...