Having successfully collected our Bergey turbine from its former home, we needed to tear down and inspect the various components of the power head to see what was wrong.The wind workers got a little help from Maintenance Director Roger Duval, pictured, a Master Electrician and an old hand with generators and like equipment.
Some problem-solving was required. The alternator on these machines bolts directly to a mainframe, composed of the yaw bearing and slip ring assembly and mounts for the tail boom, furling mechanism, and the alternator itself.
The mainframe is easily disconnected from the alternator at the connection flange. The alternator itself is somewhat less easily dismantled. In our case we hooked our tractor's fork lift to the flange and applied upward tension, tapping lightly on the magnet can with hammers.
The magnet can slid more or less gently off its own backing plate, revealing the stator and magnets.
We already suspected from the obvious misalignment of all the alternator parts that we would find damage, and we were right. The magnet can had been hanging loosely on its bearings and grinding on the stator.
There was less damage to the stator than we thought, but the magnets themselves were fairly heavily damaged.
Cleaning off all these iron filings and chunks of magnet will reveal the full extent of the damage, but at this point it looks as if we need at minimum a new magnet can and bearings.
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