[TowerTalk] Tower mast..

Jim Lux jimlux at earthlink.net
Mon Sep 18 23:23:13 EDT 2006


At 02:57 PM 9/18/2006, Merlin-7 KI4ILB wrote:
>I have been thinking about setting up my rhon 45 tower and have been 
>dwelling a bit on the mast.
>  I was thinking about having the mast go thru the tower all the way 
> to ground level and placing the rotor there.

There's been some discussion about this in the last couple days. 
Makes the rotator a lot easier to reach.  No need to have something 
wicked strong for the part inside your tower, because, unlike the 
part sticking up above, it's not resisting any bending loads.

>  I was also thinking about placing a big steel ball of somekind in 
> the bottom of the mast that would rest in a divot at the towers 
> base. That would take a lot of the weight load off of the Thrust Bearings.

Thrust bearings, as the name implies, are designed to take an axial 
thrust.  The few hundred pounds, at most, of your mast isn't 
necessarily a lot of load on the bearing (compare, for example, to 
the bearing in your car's front wheel...that has to take loads on the 
order of 1000 lbs, with substantial radial loads at the same time, at 
a much higher rotational rate.


>  What do you think?
>  Joe
>_______________________________________________




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