[TowerTalk] Tack welding rebar, need howto

[David Gilbert]

By the way, while I totally understand why you'd want to tack weld the 
bolts to the rebar, I've never thought much of welded rebar cages in 
general.  True weldable rebar (the stuff that is supposed to hold it's 
strength after welding) is expensive and harder to get.  The 40,000 PSI 
stuff you can get at Lowes and Home Depot comes from indeterminate 
source material (a mixture of washing machine chassis, old bed springs, 
car frames, salvaged rebar, etc) and almost certainly will not weld with 
consistent strength, although you can buy better 60,000 PSI stuff from 
construction supply places.

Irrespective of the source, building codes allow in line splices if the 
overlap is sufficient (equal to 20 times the diameter of the rebar or 
something like that ... don't remember for certain) and securely tied 
with wires.  For ends of rebar that meet another length of rebar in a 
Tee configuration, I bend the end of the Tee piece and hook it over the 
straight length, which I think in most cases makes a stronger connection 
than any weld would anyway.

Just some thoughts ...

73,
Dave   AB7E


On 1/3/2014 10:54 AM, Richard (Rick) Karlquist wrote:
>
>
> On 1/2/2014 8:42 PM, EZ Rhino wrote:
> Get eight more #4 rebars to use as diagonal
> to keep the thing square while you're building
> it so it doesn't turn into a parallelogram.
>
> Great idea!
>
> The rebar drawings never show these diagonals,
> so I haven't used them in the past.  But this
> sounds like a great idea in the future.  There
> is no rule saying you can't put gratuitous
> rebar in the hole.
>
> Rick N6RK
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