Re Force 12, hope I wasn't too hard on them. They still make the best
mass-produced antennas in the world, as far as I'm concerned. This talk
about them not doing their famous preassemble and drill thing before
shipping makes me nervous, though. Hope it's not true.
Now to blast our friends at Rohn, who still make good towers. However, it
appears their galvanizing cleanup work is going downhill. I just spent the
morning fitting together 8 sections of new 45G (two 40' pieces). With one
exception, every single joint had to be worked over with a grinder to remove
excess galvanizing drip and slag before they would go together. In several
cases, I had to remove as much as 1/4" of excess material. Maybe it's always
been this way - I've never bought new sections before this. But it appears
that somebody at Rohn's galvanizing plant is not paying attention to runoff
and drips in the hot dip process. I recently had a mast dipped at a large
Tulsa, OK plant. It came out perfect. When I picked it up, I saw a group of
about 10 workers in their finishing yard cleaning up just-dipped jobs. Their
stuff all leaves the plant clean and free of slag and drips. Mabye Rohn
should send some people to North American Galvanizing in Tulsa for some
training. At any rate, anybody getting ready to stack new Rohn sections
using a gin pole would be well advised to test fit every section on the
ground, and grind off any drips and runs. It would have been impossible to
stack these sections without major cleanup.
73, Jerry W5KP
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