[TowerTalk] Pad and Pier Foundations

[Jim Lux]

At 10:26 AM 7/11/2005, Kelly Johnson wrote:
>The "drilling rigs" mentioned as of late are all designed to dig a
>round hole, not a square one.  Every tower foundation spec I've seen
>(USTower, Trylon, AN Wireless) specs a square hole.  There are lots of
>building inspectors that won't accept a round hole when a square one
>is called out in the manufacturer specs.
>
>It would seem to me that these tower manufacturers need to realize
>that the specs they are creating can't be realized very easily by most
>amateurs.


Bringing up the interesting question of how big a market are amateurs. It 
may well be that the tower company doesn't have much business reason to 
change the design.  In a kinder, gentler, less regulated era, it may be 
that the plans were were more guidelines for amateur use, with the 
expectation that the regulators would be working off the "intent" and not 
requiring hard analysis.

If a tower company sells, say, 1000 towers a year, and 950 of them are to 
commercial customers who will be hiring an engineer anyway, then the 
remaining 50 sales may not justify creating a new design, especially for 
use by "non-professionals".

There's all sorts of disincentives to publishing a new design in the 
perceived liability area.  Does the new design imply that the old design 
was somehow defective?  Maybe the old design wasn't great, but because it's 
40 years old, nobody's complaining, and you've got a big installed base to 
point to for empirical data.