Vintage Windmill and Wind Generator Forum

Both for education and a bit of amusement, how about posting your ideas for a “Top Ten List” of mistakes people make with windmills.
Post as many as you want. Please note: A posting is not an admission of guilt. Any resemblance to an actual living person would be better off dead. Any resemblance to reality is pure coincidence.
Please include photo if you have any. Bryon, do you still have that great photo of you and Mark taking apart that folded over big windmill?

I do somewhere. I will see if I can find it.

Don't forget the blades being put on backwards. I have seen that a few times.

I had a call from a guy last summer that had problems with his Beatty, when I went and looked at it he had a clamp through the outer wheel band and tower leg. He couldn't understand why the wheel and stub tower got all bent up. I should have taken a picture, lol

Drain the oil out of the gear box before you have Ron lower the mill & tower.
Gregg

I would mention tying the wheel to vane almost always eventually causes grief, but one of the main things I get calls over every years that is stupid is a tower falling over. Sometimes its termites with wood going into the ground but more often they plant flowers or bushes around the base, water extensively and the legs rot so the first big 100mph wind blows it over. I had two calls last year and always at least one. Most of you folks probably put steel into the ground but most farm and ranch ones in my parts were just wood, the good ones big hedge posts. Another things is, when its on the ground, make sure you can get the plug out and save the effort on the tower.

1). "No, it's not for sale, I'm gunna fix it up".
2). Stood the tower up with the head, fan, or tail on with the crane and then had to climb the ladder remove the hook because it wouldn't drop out. As soon as I started up the ladder, a wind gust caught it, and came down on me. I maneuvered between the braces as it fell. Looked around, nobody saw me. Got up and started it upwards all over again.
3). It had good clearances when it was on the stub tower. WTF ??? (Baker Monitor).
4). I have no trouble riding a boom lift up 35 feet to install the heavy Heller Aller Baker. Then I see a cloud moving. Ooh, Ooh....
5). Yes, I can clear the tower with my hay mower going around it.
6). No wind at all today, flag fully drooped. Good time to raise a windmill.
7). That's grape vine, not poison ivy.
8). That platform was made from solid oak 70 years ago. Good as new.
9). 35' tower on a 16' trailer will have OK tongue load.
10. You put it where ? We can't see it from anywhere from inside the house. Move it.

Took down a Dandy tower probably had been there since 1900 or before. There had been a building setting beside and as it rained water ran down around the legs closest to the building. I took two legs loose and cut the angle on the othere two and was using them as my hinge point. What I didn't know about two foot below ground level the leg closest to the building had rusted through. As I was bringing it down that leg came out of the ground, it twisted and slowly layed down, off course bending one leg. No problem I didn't want a tower that tall anyway.

Never ever ever chain the wheel to the tower. Yup was guilty of that on my first mill. A big wind came and destroyed a dempster no. 10 that I had spent months rebuilding.

I’m enjoying all the interesting recollections.
Bill, I wish I had a dollar for everyone who told me that they are going to, “restore that windmill someday.”
Laying an assembled windmill facedown and letting water get into the hub is a slow and painful death to many windmills. I visited a sunbaked guy in the Nevada desert who had a lot of neat old mills lying face down on the wheels.
Every one of them had a fractured hub from water getting into the hub then freezing. The blowing sand that was coming in the mast pipe hole had filled most of the motors, but the mice did a good job keeping the mast pipe holes open to access the nest they built inside the gearbox. BTW: A maze of windmill blades keep birds of prey away, so the mice abound. Therefore, the rattlesnakes love to hang out among the windmills hoping to enjoy a windmill occupant for dinner.
There was a general value agreement that consummated the deal:
The landowner set a high value on his busted up windmills, the snakes set a high value on the mice and I set a very high value on telling everyone that I haven’t been bitten yet.
That grumpy old desert rat, his mice and snakes as well as his windmills that are going to be erected as soon as he gets his old power company truck running, looked great in my rearview mirror as my A/C kicked into high on my way back to a paved road.
As far as I know they are all still there, in the cold nights and burning hot days. However, he might have relocated to accept a high government position. On second thought, he might have been a retired fire chief or other government manager. That would explain the endless unintelligible mutter and the “hard to potty train as a child” attitude.
Kevin
PS: In retrospect, I was more afraid of the old guy than the snakes.