Agree that there are different sizes of "wire" and ways to install them
and I wasn't clear about that.
Anti-rotation safety wires (usually 0.032" stainless solid) don't do
anything if the turnbuckle breaks, they just keep it from unscrewing. I
would also add that I've found jam nuts on boom guy turnbuckles that had
loosened and on sailboat standing rigging turnbuckle bodies unscrewed to
the limit of the several passes of safety wire. The lockwasher
literature shows jam nuts don't work very well with cyclic loads.
Antenna towers and sailboat masts behave pretty much the same.
Safety cables through the associated guy thimble and anchor rod eye if
correctly sized and installed should retain a slacked guy from a broken
or unscrewed turnbuckle body or rods and hopefully keep the tower from
collapsing. My safety cables (EHS) are a figure 8 loop through the
anchor rod eye, guy thimble, and the turnbuckle body, so they do both
jobs. Since the tower is double guyed at every level, one safety cable
is used for two turnbuckles. Since the EHS is doubled it has twice the
break strength of the guy EHS, less the tight bend radius factor (-25%
w/o a thimble?), but it needs to work only long enough to fix the guy.
My safety philosophy for my 157' 8 yagi tower
is admittedly belt and suspenders.
Grant KZ1W
On 4/15/2020 09:02, Steve Maki wrote:
On 04/15/20 11:31 AM, Grant Saviers wrote:
For a few dollars, safety wires seem to me to be a good value
insurance, but YMMV for risk taking.
Absolutely. I was only gently correcting the common notion that
turnbuckle safety wires are to keep a tower from falling if the
turnbuckle *breaks*.
Which it (the safety wire) certainly will NOT do unless it's installed
way differently than is common practice.
-Steve K8LX
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