[TowerTalk] Opening Steel Hardwre AFter 15 Years

[Grant Saviers]

Agree that there are different sizes of "wire" and ways to install them 
and I wasn't clear about that.

Anti-rotation safety wires (usually 0.032" stainless solid) don't do 
anything if the turnbuckle breaks, they just keep it from unscrewing.  I 
would also add that I've found jam nuts on boom guy turnbuckles that had 
loosened and on sailboat standing rigging turnbuckle bodies unscrewed to 
the limit of the several passes of safety wire.  The lockwasher 
literature shows jam nuts don't work very well with cyclic loads. 
Antenna towers and sailboat masts behave pretty much the same.

Safety cables through the associated guy thimble and anchor rod eye if 
correctly sized and installed should retain a slacked guy from a broken 
or unscrewed turnbuckle body or rods and hopefully keep the tower from 
collapsing.  My safety cables (EHS) are a figure 8 loop through the 
anchor rod eye, guy thimble, and the turnbuckle body, so they do both 
jobs.  Since the tower is double guyed at every level, one safety cable 
is used for two turnbuckles.  Since the EHS is doubled it has twice the 
break strength of the guy EHS, less the tight bend radius factor (-25% 
w/o a thimble?), but it needs to work only long enough to fix the guy.

My safety philosophy for my 157' 8 yagi tower
  is admittedly belt and suspenders.

Grant KZ1W

On 4/15/2020 09:02, Steve Maki wrote:
> On 04/15/20 11:31 AM, Grant Saviers wrote:
> 
>> For a few dollars, safety wires seem to me to be a good value 
>> insurance, but YMMV for risk taking.
> 
> Absolutely. I was only gently correcting the common notion that 
> turnbuckle safety wires are to keep a tower from falling if the 
> turnbuckle *breaks*.
> 
> Which it (the safety wire) certainly will NOT do unless it's installed 
> way differently than is common practice.
> 
> -Steve K8LX
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