[TowerTalk] Heavy Duty Rotor

[GALE STEWARD]

A bunch of years ago a VE3 wrote up an article for CQ Magazine describing the construction of an antenna rotator using 1/3 HP reversable motor and a right-angle worm gear drive gearbox made by Boston Gear and a couple of chain drives. As I recall, the motor/gearbox was outboard of the tower and used a chain drive to turn the mast. It was a pretty slick setup and I kept the article in my files. I thought of actually building something similar at some point but so far I'm still doing well with a prop pitch.

73, Stew K3ND





________________________________
From: Jim Lux <jimlux at earthlink.net>
To: David Jordan <Wa3gin at comcast.net>
Cc: towertalk at contesting.com; 'Gene Fuller' <w2lu at rochester.rr.com>
Sent: Tuesday, September 6, 2011 5:59 PM
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] Heavy Duty Rotor

On 9/6/11 2:08 PM, David Jordan wrote:
> PPM's are great if you have $4,000 for one...
>

Exactly... seems you could find an off the shelf collection of parts 
that get you there, perhaps with a bit of bracket fabrication (mind you, 
where I used to work, the words "all you gotta do is fabricate..." were 
guaranteed to result in giggles if not outright guffaws)

But these days, $300 gets you a brand new 2HP TEFC motor, another couple 
hundred gets you a variable speed drive for it. The gearbox is going to 
be a bit tricky, because you need several stages if you're doing 
standard planetary gears to get down to the 1 RPM sort of speed you want 
from 1750.  But even so, I don't see it being more than $1000-1500 all told.

I suppose the market is SO tiny that it's not worth it for someone to do 
anything more than a custom one-off.  The existing products from M2 or 
AlfaSpid or whoever are sufficient for 99%, and for the 1%, you're going 
to be cobbling up something custom anyway.

_______________________________________________



_______________________________________________
TowerTalk mailing list
TowerTalk at contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/towertalk