Wednesday

Today was our longest and most complicated day. Mike woke up early and went down to San Pedro with Aldolfo and Stephanie to pick up special wire for the solar panels. This is a two hour drive one way. Back at the pig farm we had troubles with both the drilling and the tower building. For drilling, we we working on making the hole wider to get ready for casing, but our mud pump kept loosing suction which means we can't drill. After multiple attempts to fix it ourselves we had no choice but to stop working. Building the tower also ran into difficulties. We are using a new set of tower plans for the first time. While the plans had a few issues we made it worse by drilling holes in 4" metal plates that were too close together. This was exasperated further by a lack of accuracy in the drilling of a local blacksmith we hired. I was about to have 32 new plates cut and drilled with four holes each. 

Mike arrived back from San Pedro around 1 pm with the operation in total shutdown. After looking further at the pump with Aldolfo, we decided it needed to be taken to a local machine shop for repairs. Mike then looked at the tower and came up with a brilliant, out of the box idea; got rid of the 4" plates! We will have to drill 32 new holes to make this work, but it is much better than 32 cuts and 128 holes. It was good to have our leader back. 

The machine shop was able to fix the pump in a few hours and we were back at it just as the sun was setting. We brought over a generator and lights to keep working into the night. We were able to widen the hole about 175' deep and stopped working around 8pm. 

Tomorrow we will decide how much deeper we want to drill before casing the hole. The tower should be able to be finished tomorrow, Lord willing. While every day has been critical, tomorrow will be key for our success. Please pray for the Lord's wisdom an mercy. He has been faithful to keep us safe and provide excellent weather. 

-Krister

Me drilling holes in the metal for our tower:

Continuing to work after the sun has set:

A wolf spider. We have these in Colorado, but they seem to have a lot more here! They are nocturnal and hunt their prey instead of spinning webs. They live in holes and are harmless to humans. 

Six little piggies taking a nap. Can you count all of them?