tail-pole

plural tail-poles · alternative tail pole · alternative tailpole

1. A wooden pole, usually fifteen to twenty-five long and nine inches in diameter, used to rotate a windmill into the wind.

   Old post-mills were turned or 'luffed' into the wind by a pole variously called the tail-pole, tail-beam, turning-beam, or tiller-beam.

   2011, Stanley Freese, Windmills and Millwrighting, Cambridge University Press, page 40

   1 more example

   For a long time the turning was done manually, simply by pushing on a long tail-pole extending downwards, almost to the ground, from the rotatable superstructure.

   1960, Thomas Kingston Derry, Trevor Illtyd Williams, A Short History of Technology from the Earliest Times to A.D. 1900, Courier Corporation, page 256

   Synonyms: tail-beam, turning-beam, tiller-beam