When I first started thinking about a tower, someone told me (or I read
somewhere), "Don't buy a used tower, not even from Jesus Christ." Not
how I, a pastor (since retired), would have put it myself, but I think
the underlying idea is a good one (and it fits with what my late father
instilled into me: "When you buy a used car you're buying someone else's
troubles").
Although a tower and a car are very different, both take professional
expertise to assess their reliability -- a car because of its inherent
complexity, a tower (a tubular tower, anyway) because so much is out of
sight and impossible to evaluate.
One man I know in this area bought a house that had a tower (Rohn 25, I
think, that probably had been used for a TV antenna) that he did not
want, so he donated it to the local radio club if they would take it
down. This happened before I moved here, but what I hear from my fellow
club members is that they were surprised that it hadn't fallen down
because of its condition; I don't think it was much use for anything but
scrap.
73
Alan NV8A
On 06/27/07 10:11 am Tom Anderson wrote:
> Back in the late 1980s my XYL Cheryl (WY5H) and I looked at a house on
> an acre of land that had 3 towers on i, 1-60 and 2-40 ft ones. It
> turned out the owner wouldn't negotiate on the price at all, so we
> passed and never even looked at the towers. A couple weeks later the
> Realtor called me and said he had a buyer, but did I know someone who
> would take the tower down as the purchaser wasn't a ham?
>
> The towers were made by a local Fort Worth TX area welding shop and
> apparently didn't conform to any national standards. I gave him the
> name of a ham who did it usually for free if they gave him the tower.
> Well I heard later from this ham that these towers were so corroded that
> he ended up charging the Realtor $500 to take them down and then sold
> the towers for scrap. He said he had never been that scared taking down
> a tower. It seems just about the only thing holding the towers up was
> the corrosion. The tubing coming out of the ground was extremely
> corroded and cracked from freeze damage. He said he shook more than the
> towers did while up top taking off the hardware.
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