[Tagging] metal-bladed windmills for water pumps

[Mark Bradley]

> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2017 21:21:12 +0900
> From: John Willis <johnw at mac.com>
> To: "Tag discussion, strategy and related tools"
> 	<tagging at openstreetmap.org>
> Subject: Re: [Tagging] metal bladed windmills for water pumps
> Message-ID: <1F5C3E86-2B0E-4345-9378-DD3FDACF1F8C at mac.com>
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> 
> 
> Javbw
> 
> > On Jun 13, 2017, at 8:13 PM, Warin <61sundowner at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > If you followed the history link I gave above you get They can be traced back to the
> year 644 in Persia. Bit before the industrial revolution.
> 
> The idea of using a wind driven shaft with a cam and a rod and a leather sealing
> element in a bored well for getting water out of the ground is really old. But those
> "windmills", I will assume, look like traditional windmills because of the structure
> needed to hold all the big heavy Main (wooden/bamboo) fan shafts and a driving
> shaft, cam, etc needed would have to have a small building of some kind - the stresses
> needed to pump water and handle wind load for wooden things with no bearings or
> gearboxes is pretty large if it is a permanent structure. Perhaps the really old ones in
> China were temporary, until a typhoon destroyed them. If it is some permanent thing,
> It's gonna be a building. I purposefully defined the traditional windmill as "operating
> some machinery" in the base - a mill, a trip hammer, a cam pump - whatever it
> happens to be - it is a building.
> 
> A windpump: Using a small (mass-produced metal) transmission in a box on a derrick
> which can only move a rod up and down about 6 inches is similar only in that there is
> a fan disc - the building isn't present, the entire mechanism is in an outdoor gearbox,
> and the whole thing spins on the derrick because the gearbox is about the size of a
> suitcase on metal stilts. It can follow the wind because it has a tail (vane) that is the
> size of a car hood.
> 
> The only thing of great significance is the gearbox the size of a suitcase. The rest a
> bits of metal angle-iron and sheet metal.
> 
> A windpump can trace it's heritage back to the mechanism inside that pumped water
> a 1400 years ago - but so can all of those big permanent holland windmills - this is
> more about the structures - big buildings vs a box on a derrick - and a name to
> separate them.
> 
> They are all generally called windmills - my father calls his "windpump" a windmill - in
> the same way a person calls train cars "cars" when they are power cars, or MPU cars,
> or some other name - but it is a easy way for people "in the know" to differentiate
> them.
> 
> Javbw
> 


There are many old windpumps in the Midwestern part of the United States.  Built in the 1800's and 1900's, most are now broken down and no longer used.  Some have been restored and are left standing for aesthetic purposes.  (In one of the earlier posts in this thread someone referenced a picture of one of them, but I have since deleted that post.)  Like Javbw's father, I believe most people in the Midwestern US would call them "windmills" and not "windpumps."  I would like to point out that many (most?) of them were created for pumping natural gas out of the ground, not water.  They were mapped on the USGS topographic maps.  You will see them symbolized with a small hollow circle, with the label "Gas well."

Mark