[TowerTalk] Screw Anchor Question

Jim Lux jimlux at earthlink.net
Mon Jan 16 00:58:38 EST 2006


At 09:08 PM 1/15/2006, k0dan wrote:
>Well from my recently-related tower adventure of some years ago (Rest In
>Peace), this is definitely the case. What perturbs me (and this is all water
>of the damn dam now) is that there were no warnings or other implementation
>notes from either the anchor manufacturer nor the distributor. Interestingly
>they did come with suggestion on how to install, and in what kind of soils,
>but nothing else. Without other experience or guidance the "amateur" just
>goes on his merry way, believing he is doing things right.


I think that there's a whole raft of things that are available that sort of 
presume that the installer/user knows what they are doing (which may not be 
the case). This is especially true with structural stuff.

Steel I-beams don't come with instruction sheets, nor does structural 
pipe.  Even some more specialized stuff (screw anchors come to mind) 
doesn't seem to have any sort of handy "applications note" (at least not 
when I was looking for it).  We just told the folks installing the anchors 
the loads we needed to deal with, and they selected an appropriate anchor 
and installed it.  For that scale, it's a pretty specialized operation.  I 
seem to recall that there was really only one firm in the greater Los 
Angeles/Southern California area that did this kind of work (the name began 
with a B, I think, in case someone's looking for such things).

I'd hate to have to try and figure out the strength of such a thing from 
first principles.




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