He added: "The other day we had 50-odd knots but I can't tell you an exact number because at the height of the crescendo we lost our wind gear off the top of the mast.
The American Wind Energy Association offers a useful guide for going through the necessary steps to install your own turbine, as well as a list of wind gear providers.
"The slag heaps were grassed over, the winding gears were nowhere to be seen, and when we spoke to people they said, 'Oh, that was the first thing they did.' There was a cultural cleansing of the entire area.
Remove the screw that holds the film winding gears in place.
In the distance, set back against a grey mountain of coal waste a century in the making, stands Maltby's monumental winding gear, silent and brooding.
Fenced off shafts, tailings (dumps of waste sand) and ruined engine houses that used to work pumps, winding gear and stamps (crushers) are engulfed in birch trees and flowering gorse.
In my teens, I could cycle off with a sketchbook in any direction and within a few miles come across a pithead winding-gear and a triangular waste heap, whose combination of straight lines and circles (the winding wheel) could be easily drawn.
Now the winding gear is silent and the only noise comes from enormous bulldozers hauling down buildings and flattening earth as part of a £25m scheme to turn the colliery near Doncaster into a 120-acre "distribution park" where supermarkets or transport companies sort and shuffle their wares in an initiative that could create 1,500 jobs.
The modern towers containing the winding gear still overshadow the main street but, unless someone comes up with a £100m investment, the last evidence of the industry that brought Simpson's father, Tom senior, from the Durham coalfield will disappear in 18 months' time.
The pit-head winding gear sits at the side of a roundabout - the scene so familiar in regeneration towns like Ebbw Vale.
