[TowerTalk] My first introduction to guy-wire dead end grips

[Bill Parry]

When I put up my 120 feet of Rohn 25 I was a little leery about the grips.
But my tower guy who puts up a lot bigger commercial towers than mine said
that that is all they use and that I shouldn't have another thought. That
was in 2001 and I have had absolutely no problems. He built my tower guyed
it and had it finished in one day. The next morning he put my two yagis on
top. Slickest operation I ever saw.  I know you guys that are into towers
probably see this all the time but, being a neophyte, I was amazed. The set
up has been up for 14 years now and survived a near miss of a hurricane with
winds of 90 mph all night so I guess he did good.

Bill W5VX

-----Original Message-----
From: TowerTalk [mailto:towertalk-bounces at contesting.com] On Behalf Of Kevin
Kidd
Sent: Friday, January 08, 2016 8:21 AM
To: Patrick Greenlee
Cc: reflector -tower
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] My first introduction to guy-wire dead end grips

I was originally leery of the grips but now specify them exclusively.

The only grips that I have ever personally known to slide or fail were the
wrong grip installed on the wrong sized cable.  Thankfully there was only a
couple wrong sized grips on a tall tower and the tower is still standing
even after it shed a couple guy wires in it's first storm.  ALL grips were
checked after finding that...  They are color coded for size and someone
installed the wrong grips.  This was a case where a local government
accepted the lowest bid and got what they paid for.

We have had several local 300+ft towers come down over the years (2
tractor/vehicle, 2 ice, 1 tornado, 1 anchor failure that I can think of).
Most of these towers used grips and although I didn't check each and every
grip, I didn't find a single grip that had slipped or unwound.  At one of
the tractor caused failures, I found a grip firmly attached to a short piece
of broken guy wire.  The guy cable failed before the grip.  A few of the
grips HAD failed where they were looped around a sharp edge without a
thimble.  However, the tower leg pulled out and failed so it was mostly a
moot point.

I found a tower at station that we were working on where EVERY examined wrap
had been installed with the guy cable only extending about halfway into the
wrap.  About half of the wrap was wrapped around nothing.  This was an AM
tower with lots of wraps around guy insulators and every wrap that I could
see from the ground was installed in this manner.  The tower had been
standing there for  20+ years and as far as I know, is still standing now
several years later.


On Thu, Jan 7, 2016 at 2:12 PM, Patrick Greenlee <patrick_g at windstream.net>
wrote:

> A lot of them in service and I have never heard of one loosing its grip.
> Anyone ever know about one loosing its grip?




Kevin C. Kidd, CSRE/AMD
AM Ground Systems Company  -  WD4RAT
kkidd at kkbc.com  --  866-22-RADIO -- 866-227-2346 www.amgroundsystems.com
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