When I tell you that ...

... I knocked off at 17:27 today, you will probably think something like "idle burger" or something like that. But not a bit of it. In fact, that was when I stopped for lunch.

Putting this wind turbine was not as easy as you might think. First thing was to solder two longer wires to the couple of inches that come out of the wind turbine. My soldering is total rubbish, and what didn't help was that the heavy-duty soldering iron I bought from LIDL ages ago didn't want to work properly. 

After trying a couple of others, it was the ancient soldering iron that I had bought from Tandy (and that tells you how old it is) that did some kind of a job on the wiring.

Collecting all the tools, I then went off up the ladder to the top of the scaffolding (and you can see how high I was as well - right at the top and that was nerve-wracking) and that wasn't easy either. One of the more difficult issues was fitting the wind turbine through the hatch in the lean-to floor. I had to dismantle the blasted thing, carry it through and up the ladder and then reassemble it on top.

Passing the wire down the tube was something else as well. For some reason it didn't want to go down and I had to spend an age persuading it.

Fitting the wind turbine on the pole was exciting as well and it was quite a feat of balance to do that on a scaffolding like that. I then had to fix the rudder back on the wind turbine but that was something of an issue as it seemed that the captive nut that holds the rudder on had sheared off. And so that meant climbing right up there, undoing the side of the turbine, and putting a nut and bolt in place.

It was at that moment that the wind sprang up, and if it wasn't easy before, then trying to do this right up there with the thing swinging around and the blades going round like the clappers - that just made it worse.

But anyway it's up there, and it's all wired in as well. But I couldn't solder up the wires which was annoying - not even the Tandy soldering iron would do that - and so I've had to use chocolate blocks for that and the sheath that I put over the conduit now won't cover up the joints.

As you can tell, it wasn't easy and it was no wonder that,having decided to work right through until I finished, it was so late when I came to a stop. And I wasn't feeling like carrying on.

But anyway, I know it works. It will be interesting to see what power it gives out.