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Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Central Arizona Project, Restringing a Day Night Shade

September 22, 2010Bill Williams River NWR

Another week of volunteering at Bill Williams National Wildlife Refuge under our belt. Temperatures this week have continued to be over 100 degrees with low’s in the upper 70’s by dawn.
Lake Havasu, just steps from our door.
We started work this week on Sunday and we did a lot of trail upkeep, filled the endangered Pup Fish pond, fed the tortoise and did a lot of our regular tasks. Joyce worked inside the visitor center and fisheries offices cleaning. I worked on a list of small maintenance and repair projects. We made two trips to Lake Havasu in the refuge vehicles running down materials at the local ACE Hardware and dropping off a load of recyclable materials. It was a busy 3 days that goes by rather quickly as now we are off again for the next three days.
In the picture below, our site which is out of view, is located on the upper left bank. The bridge is for Hwy 95. Behind the bridge is the Central Arizona Project pump station that pumps water out of Lake Havasu up the mountain then through the mountain from a pumping station that you can see 2/3s of the way up the mountain. The water is provided to municipalities in central Arizona such as Phoenix.
Central Arizona Project is designed to bring about 1.5 million acre-feet of Colorado River water per year to Pima, Pinal and Maricopa counties. CAP carries water from Lake Havasu near Parker to the southern boundary of the San Xavier Indian Reservation southwest of Tucson. It is a 336-mile long system of aqueducts, tunnels, pumping plants and pipelines and is the largest single resource of renewable water supplies in the state of Arizona.


A couple days ago, one of the day/ night shades in our rig came crashing down after 3 of the 4 strings in the shade broke. I couldn’t find the proper poly rope to restring the blinds so I picked up some twisted polyester rope at a hardware store.


We managed to take the blind apart and restring the blind with the twisted polyester rope. It works but I'm not sure how long the twisted polyester rope will last. I’ll need to order some string on line as a couple other blinds have strings that may break soon!

2 comments:

  1. No fun restringing the blinds, been there and done that. I found on mine, the edges of the holes where the string goes through had sharp edges, they still had some tiny pieces of metal from where the holes were drilled. I filed the little edges a smooth as possible and (knock wood) they have not sliced the strings again.

    I read where you can use hi test fishing line that is supposed to be stronger than the stock cord. I'll look into that if (when) another string breaks.

    I really enjoy your blog, keep up the good work.

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  2. Not sure how similar they are but I've restrung a mini-blind and wondered later if it was worth it! I really enjoy your blog. Thanks for sharing your adventures.

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