This morning we met in the TWR Studios at 8am for staff devotions.  I am guessing there were around 30 in attendance when there are normally about 10.  One lady was there with her daughter to visit the grave of Virgil Stanley, a TWR missionary that died in a diving accident in the mid 1960s. She is Virgil’s sister and today was the first time a member of the family had been on Bonaire since then.

Jonas and Daryl installing disconnect switch box.  It would have been a lot easier had the box been there when the cables were originally pulled in last March!

After devotions we went to the transmitter site.  Other teams installed the 1600 amp disconnect switch box, continued transmitter assembly and began sprucing up the old transmitter hall for the dedication ceremony scheduled for January 30.  I finished leveling the remaining transmitter cabinets and bolted them together.

The 1600 amp disconnect switch box finally mounted to the wall

Now the heavy work began–wiring the incoming cables to the 1600 amp disconnect switch, which took the remainder of the day with occasional interruptions to give advice to the team doing transmitter assembly.

Larry and Frank using special tools to bend the 500mcm cables

We did discover that the transmitter manufacturer did not include the cable terminals to attach the cables to the transformer from the output of the disconnect switch.  There were extra connectors on the disconnect switch so these were removed to put on the transformer to terminate the cables.  Daryl and Jonas had to make some modifications to bolt these extra connectors to the copper bus bars on the input side of the transformer.

All nine cables are now connected to the input of the disconnect switch.

Good progress was made today, but it did seem a little warmer.  We’ll still see if we can make do without the air conditioner to sleep tonight.