[TowerTalk] Opening Steel Hardwre AFter 15 Years

[Steve Maki]

The purpose of the safety wire is to prevent vandals from unscrewing the 
turnbuckle. Some say that it's also to prevent the turnbuckle from 
unscrewing due to vibration - but I've never seen that tendency in 
turnbuckles under guy wire tension.

Properly sized turnbuckles are not the weak link in the system - it's 
the guy wire itself.

-Steve K8LX

On 04/14/20 22:16 PM, K9MA wrote:
> I ran into the same problem when I replaced my tower last year. I used 
> Big Grips on the guys, but wanted to use cable clamps on the safety wire 
> through the turnbuckles, which was to be 3/16 EHS. Except for some bare 
> iron ones, none of the clamps I could find were rated for 1X7 EHS; all 
> were rated for 7X19, etc, with more strands.  I think the key is that 
> the saddles have to be malleable, because it's impossible to compress 
> 1X7 EHS. (Ever try to cut the stuff?)  I finally ended up buying some 
> finely stranded SS cable and clamps for the safety wires. Overkill, 
> maybe, but if a turnbuckle fails, I want the safety wire to hold the 
> tower up.
> 
> 73,
> Scott K9MA
> 
> 
> 
> On 4/14/2020 17:05, Donald Chester wrote:
>> Keith Dutson kdutson at sbcglobal.net Sat Apr 4 19:28:59 EDT 2020 wrote:
>>
>>> Good reminder to always use hot dipped galvanized hardware.
>> I re-guyed my Rohn 25 a couple of years ago.  Big Grips are great for 
>> attaching insulators breaking up
>> guy cables on my 160m vertical, but I use wire rope clamps on the 
>> chains of 3 insulators  next to the
>> tower because with Big Grips the insulators would be spaced too far 
>> apart for my liking.
>>
>> I ordered new clamps from Rohn, but the ones I received were cheap 
>> zinc plated like something from
>> Ace Hardware, and the saddles are so poorly made that they slipped on 
>> the cable when I tested
>> them under tension using a ratchet puller. I called the Rohn dealer 
>> and they told me they couldn't get
>> the good hot-dipped clamps any more, since almost everyone now uses 
>> Big Grips exclusively.  I looked
>> on line and the good hot-dipped clips from Crosby are very expensive, 
>> about $7 each (mine cost me
>> 35¢ each in 1980).
>>
>> I ended up re-using the old ones after carefully inspecting each one, 
>> and painted over them with a heavy
>> coat of Rustoleum aluminium paint.  I used some of the crappy ones I 
>> got from Rohn for another
>> (non-tower) project, and sure enough, the U-bolts and nuts are now 
>> heavily rusted after only two years,
>> much more so than the original clamps I had installed nearly 40 years 
>> ago.  The re-used and painted ones
>> on the tower guy wires still look as good as the day I installed 
>> them.  I have found that ordinary aluminium
>> paint lasts longer before rust begins to peer through, than the 
>> "Cold-Galv" stuff.
>>
>> I still have a bucket full of the crappy ones I got from Rohn.  
>> Haven't decided whether to take them to
>> a  hamfest and sell for whatever I can get for them, or to toss them 
>> in the dumpster.  I would hate for
>> someone else to buy them from me and have a tower fail when the cables 
>> slipped during a heavy wind-
>> storm.  I would have returned them if I hadn't fooled around and 
>> waited more than a year before opening
>> the box when I was ready to use them, and discovering what they sent 
>> me. I didn't bother, since I doubt
>> they would have accepted a return after I had waited that long.
>>
>> Don k4kyv
>> _______________________________________________
>>
>>
>>
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> 
>