How do you raise a cap?

With difficulty! There should be a word for fitting rafters to to make a windmill cap roof..... Well, if it's good enough for barns, it's good enough for windmills; so I'll call it raising. Anyway, that is the stage we reached today. We have trial fitted the ribs in place, using a temporary pattern instead of the actual finial (we'll leave that challenge until we assemble the cap for real on-site). This was a tricky procedure, especially for the first few ribs, but the more we added, the easier it became. By the end of the day, we had all the tenoned ribs in place - that leaves us with the tapered ones to fit in-between.

Wow, it's starting to look like a windmill

Other items from the previous few days:

The braces for the truck wheels have been finished and fitted;

Two of the four new truck wheel braces

and we have made a start on the storm hatch and neck block

Starting the storm hatch; the weather studs fitted to the weather beam

The old neck block (supports the bearing for the windshaft), doesn't look too bad from this angle

From beneath, doesn't look quite so good!

Starting to make a new neck block