[TowerTalk] Pad and Pier Foundations

[Kelly Johnson]

OK, I can buy that.  So, if they are spec'ing square holes for
commercial users then those commercial users must have a reasonable
way of creating the required holes.  It seems unlikely to me that they
go down to Home Depot and hire a couple guys from the street to dig
the hole by hand :-)  Anyone know what the commercial guys do?


On 7/11/05, Jim Lux <jimlux at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 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.
> 
> 
> 
>