[TowerTalk] Tower ACCIDENT

Alan NV8A nv8a at att.net
Wed Jun 27 11:26:06 EDT 2007


When I first started thinking about a tower, someone told me (or I read 
somewhere), "Don't buy a used tower, not even from Jesus Christ." Not 
how I, a pastor (since retired), would have put it myself, but I think 
the underlying idea is a good one (and it fits with what my late father 
instilled into me: "When you buy a used car you're buying someone else's 
troubles").

Although a tower and a car are very different, both take professional 
expertise to assess their reliability -- a car because of its inherent 
complexity, a tower (a tubular tower, anyway) because so much is out of 
sight and impossible to evaluate.

One man I know in this area bought a house that had a tower (Rohn 25, I 
think, that probably had been used for a TV antenna) that he did not 
want, so he donated it to the local radio club if they would take it 
down. This happened before I moved here, but what I hear from my fellow 
club members is that they were surprised that it hadn't fallen down 
because of its condition; I don't think it was much use for anything but 
scrap.

73

Alan NV8A


On 06/27/07 10:11 am Tom Anderson wrote:

> Back in the late 1980s my XYL Cheryl (WY5H) and I looked at a house on 
> an acre of land that had 3 towers on i, 1-60 and 2-40 ft ones.  It 
> turned out the owner wouldn't negotiate on the price at all, so we 
> passed and never even looked at the towers.  A couple weeks later the 
> Realtor called me and said he had a buyer, but did I know someone who 
> would take the tower down as the purchaser wasn't a ham?
> 
> The towers were made by a local Fort Worth TX area welding shop and 
> apparently didn't conform to any national standards.  I gave him the 
> name of a ham who did it usually for free if they gave him the tower. 
> Well I heard later from this ham that these towers were so corroded that 
> he ended up charging the Realtor $500 to take them down and then sold 
> the towers for scrap.  He said he had never been that scared taking down 
> a tower.  It seems just about the only thing holding the towers up was 
> the corrosion.  The tubing coming out of the ground was extremely 
> corroded and cracked from freeze damage.  He said he shook more than the 
> towers did while up top taking off the hardware.



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