15 March 2004 Click image for full size!
While I have jobs to do every day, it can get somewhat monotonous at times- then something breaks.....yay! I get to do tech work! This was a relatively minor job- one of the sun trackers on the roof stopped tracking, so I brought it in and checked it out and it turned out that a couple of the gears in the mechanism were worn out pretty completely. So I did the simple thing- I cannibalized the gear box (the grey box) from another dead sun tracker sitting on the shelf as a spare. It's really quite simple- the two RPM motor (yes, 2) turns the gears and allows the instrument mounted on top to track the sun throughout the day, with the 60hz AC supplying the timing. The only bad thing is depending on the accuracy of the AC power- the generators here aren't quite 60hz, more like 59.5hz or something like that, so we have to go up on the roof and adjust things by had every now and then.