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November 19, 1999

Fulton, IL, USA - Putting the pieces together: the "Big Lift"

The day started out beautifully, a little cold, but a clear blue sky and hardly any wind.
Soon Cattani's crane was attached to the octagon for the first lift of the day.
After half an hour, however, clouds appeared and the wind was beginning to gain strength.

Still the weather did in no way bother the work, that is... yet.
Lifting the octagon into place is a precise job, Eric Ufkes is communicating with the crane driver
through Randy Balk, Fulton's superintendant for Public Works, while the octagon is lowered unto
the concrete base and adjusted "hair width by hair width". Pretty smooth operation, all in all...

After the octagon was put into place, first the head and then the first of the two pairs
of sails were lifted to their spots.

 

After putting the sails into place, they had to be bolted up, a difficult job for the crane driver who had to position the sails exactly correct to line up to the pre-drilled holes for the bolts.
It became practically undoable and dangerous too to continue because by then the wind had gained so much strength.
Therefor we decided to cancel the lift of the second pair of sails and to reschedule that to the next morning.
Sails being constructed to catch as much wind as they can, were catching too much of it by 4 PM to allow us to safely continue.


Saturday morning, November 20, proved to
be a perfect day for the job still left to be done:
the second pair of sails.

Within half an hour the job was done and Fulton's -still nameless- windmill was proudly overlooking
the Mississippi River by 9 AM on Saturday morning, November 20 1999.

Part of the finishing work, now the structure was in place, was to put in the pine floor at 'belt-level'.
Here Johan Havenga is working on that.

The remaining work will be done after winter and before the official opening on May 6, 2000.

Note
The photos on this page are of a slightly different format than before: a 35mm panoramic Hasselblad XPan camera
seemed to be best suited for this photo job. Although, of course the photos loose a lot of their detail and crispyness
while being processed for reasonably fast loading on the internet.
A HP Photosmart S20 2400dpi 35mm negative scanner was used for scanning the negatives because,
surprisingly, this device has a '35mm panoramic' mode.
Adobe Photoshop was used to process the graphical files for display on the internet.
Anyone can feel free to download the photos on this page and other pages on this internet site that are
not copyrighted Fulton Journal (!) and use them for their own purposes, as long as a reference to this
internet site is included when they are published for public viewing. You can request higher resolution copies
of many of the photos by sending an e-mail to bertb@xs4all.nl

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