Alirght so i had trouble uploading picture to my album but i will start from scratch here.
About 4 months back a freind of mine at work told me that his step father had a 40 foot tower that he would like to get rid of, with that being said we agreed on the price for the tower and it came out to a case of 24 of coors light ( which is ok, i am not a fan of coors either way lol).
Having never taken a tower down before i quickly learn that it would have been great to have brought a car jack to take the sections apart in the air, although i ended up bringing it down with alot of rope and some volenteers that were felling a tree next door.
During a week i slowly started doing some refurb on it cleaning all the surface corrosion with a wire wheel, after that was all done I used tremclad galvanized metal white primer and aluminum colored paint , roughly around 6 cans of primer and 4 of paint. all of the tower section's got 3 coats of primer and 2 coats of paint.
The hardest part was must definetly diging the hole for the base, man i will never dig another hole by hand ever LOL.
The hole for the base of the tower is roughly 37 long 28 wide and 28 deep all in inches.
In the very bottom of the hole i put in one bag of stone dust, droped my first section in with a friend of mine, we braced everything up to make it plum and level aswell as laying a grid of chain linked fence in the hole 4 inches above the stone dust. We also drove 3 3 foot by 1 1/2'' pipes on an angle to create a little more "bite" and tied that in with the chain link and tower section.
now for the mixing of the concrete, i had ordered 24 bags of readymix rate at 3700 psi slow curing and used roughly 20 bags in all, I also rented a trailer mounted mixer for the weekend because i did not feel the need to destroy my electric drill with all that mixing.
We mixed 2.5 bags at a time for eas of carrying and pour and after each pour i added more chain link in strands making eithier grids or vertical hoops around the tower section. The very last pour i cut out some chicken wire laid it flat and fit it around the tower legs just for giggles.
The longer wait was probably the curing i got lucky the first few days it rained quite a bit and kept the slab moist, for 1 1/2 of a week i had the garden hose sprinkling the slab with high hopes of a good cure!
This sunday was the day of truth the day the tower and the new Maco v5/8 would be put up.
Seeing as an mjf 259b is a little expensive 3 of us split the bill for it, and might i say that little black box is wonderfull! it took less time to tune my maco than putting it together i ended up with r=54 x=5 1.1 swr on 27.206 at 10 feet of the ground.
Now for the what we though was going to be the hard part, we assembled 2 sections of tower with the antenna on the ground with the coax root down its section's.
To hoist that bugger up we tied off a rope to the top section while he walked it up i pulled the tower and kept it footed. then we walked it towards the base section and proceeded toput it together. Now i am a little bit afraid of heights but i still went up on the roofsat over the peak and pulled the tower up until he was able to line up the sections and put the bolt's in, and what seems like an eternity it was finished and impressive!
So with all that i made my coax end for the radio plugged it in to the 2000GTL it still keys 4 wats and nothing more, skip was really rolling so i key up the radio and right away get a reply from columbus Ohio.
So all in all im very happy with how it is performing at this moment 4 watts 800 miles with good conditions is good in my books!
Thanks for taking the time reading this far and have a great one!
About 4 months back a freind of mine at work told me that his step father had a 40 foot tower that he would like to get rid of, with that being said we agreed on the price for the tower and it came out to a case of 24 of coors light ( which is ok, i am not a fan of coors either way lol).
Having never taken a tower down before i quickly learn that it would have been great to have brought a car jack to take the sections apart in the air, although i ended up bringing it down with alot of rope and some volenteers that were felling a tree next door.
During a week i slowly started doing some refurb on it cleaning all the surface corrosion with a wire wheel, after that was all done I used tremclad galvanized metal white primer and aluminum colored paint , roughly around 6 cans of primer and 4 of paint. all of the tower section's got 3 coats of primer and 2 coats of paint.
The hardest part was must definetly diging the hole for the base, man i will never dig another hole by hand ever LOL.
The hole for the base of the tower is roughly 37 long 28 wide and 28 deep all in inches.
In the very bottom of the hole i put in one bag of stone dust, droped my first section in with a friend of mine, we braced everything up to make it plum and level aswell as laying a grid of chain linked fence in the hole 4 inches above the stone dust. We also drove 3 3 foot by 1 1/2'' pipes on an angle to create a little more "bite" and tied that in with the chain link and tower section.
now for the mixing of the concrete, i had ordered 24 bags of readymix rate at 3700 psi slow curing and used roughly 20 bags in all, I also rented a trailer mounted mixer for the weekend because i did not feel the need to destroy my electric drill with all that mixing.
We mixed 2.5 bags at a time for eas of carrying and pour and after each pour i added more chain link in strands making eithier grids or vertical hoops around the tower section. The very last pour i cut out some chicken wire laid it flat and fit it around the tower legs just for giggles.
The longer wait was probably the curing i got lucky the first few days it rained quite a bit and kept the slab moist, for 1 1/2 of a week i had the garden hose sprinkling the slab with high hopes of a good cure!
This sunday was the day of truth the day the tower and the new Maco v5/8 would be put up.
Seeing as an mjf 259b is a little expensive 3 of us split the bill for it, and might i say that little black box is wonderfull! it took less time to tune my maco than putting it together i ended up with r=54 x=5 1.1 swr on 27.206 at 10 feet of the ground.
Now for the what we though was going to be the hard part, we assembled 2 sections of tower with the antenna on the ground with the coax root down its section's.
To hoist that bugger up we tied off a rope to the top section while he walked it up i pulled the tower and kept it footed. then we walked it towards the base section and proceeded toput it together. Now i am a little bit afraid of heights but i still went up on the roofsat over the peak and pulled the tower up until he was able to line up the sections and put the bolt's in, and what seems like an eternity it was finished and impressive!
So with all that i made my coax end for the radio plugged it in to the 2000GTL it still keys 4 wats and nothing more, skip was really rolling so i key up the radio and right away get a reply from columbus Ohio.
So all in all im very happy with how it is performing at this moment 4 watts 800 miles with good conditions is good in my books!
Thanks for taking the time reading this far and have a great one!
