SnowRooster
Cosmic cast away…
2A Bourbon Hound 2024
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https://www.liveleak.com/view?t=kagzF_1568953363
I thought this was pretty cool the see
I thought this was pretty cool the see
Radio tower demolition don’t see that every day
- Thread starter SnowRooster
- Start date
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Surprised it went down so straight. I would have thought it would have gone down in an arc and broke into multiple pieces as the angular acceleration would have been greater than gravity the farther out you go.
I'm lookin at one 300 yards from where I'm sittin…….ya ready?? Come on.
There’s a rickety one outside of Siler City that the county owns. It’s unsafe to climb. However, in about a month, an existing, but abandoned, antenna on it is going to be used as a ham radio repeater.
9outof10mms
Enginerding, good coffee, and factual opinions.
2A Bourbon Hound 2024
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Way cooler than the one I watched come down piece by piece.
DrPhudd
Joe thinks I'm clever
They achieve that by burning kerosene near the top
My vote for post of the day.
Askin' for a friend?
backwoodsshooter
there’s always a method to the madness
Sad. I guess it wasn’t worth taking apart and selling it.
Depending on condition, It would probably cost far more than the tower is worth to hire a crew to take it down piece by piece. Commercial crews cost big money.
ES44AC
Happy to be here
I know when you put up a new tower now can't have any structure other than your own building in the " Fall Zone ". This is a huge area, and in the old days this wasn't an issue. Iredell county allowed a land owner to sell lots to people for a double wide community back in the '80s. They had ice falling through their roofs off the tower. The state put up a Viper tower and the fall zone has I77 in it 
Years ago and in a different life I was Executive VP and GM of a company in Indiana that engineered, manufactured and erected radio towers.
When space permits, cutting an anchor is pretty much the standard way to disassemble a tower - especially one that has safety issues. We used to use a cutting torch instead of a porta band.
The crew removing that FM Radio tower appears to be from ERI (electronics Research, Inc), a FM antenna and tower manufacturing company based in Newburgh, IN. They had already removed several of the guy wires (including at the torque arms) and reduced tension on the remaining wires before they cut the anchor.
9 out of 10 towers that lose a guy anchor will end up with all of the tower sections piled up within 100’ of the base of the tower. It is extremely uncommon for a tower to fall over to the side in one piece.
That reminds me of the time that I was the most frightened that I’ve ever been in my life.
29 years ago last month I was sitting on top of the 300’ self supporting WECT tower in downtown Wilmington NC. I was in the process of replacing the tower lighting bulbs on the tower. It was a 1940’s vintage tower - somewhat similar to the one that used to appear at the beginning of the old RKO pictures releases.
After tapering from around 40’ wide at the bottom, the top 60’ of tower were a straight section - 30” face as I recall. On top of the tower was a 48” diameter solid metal plate that overhung the tower section by about a foot all of the way around. The beacon was bolted on top of that plate.
In order to change the lamps (there are 2 in the beacon), when I got to the top of the tower I had to unhook my safety, and climb past that plate so that I could sit flat on the top of it with the beacon in-between my legs. The top of the tower had pipe legs, which extended an inch or so above the plate. One of the pipe legs was right below my crotch when I was sitting on top of that plate.
After replacing the bulbs, I radioed down to the tower engineer to turn the lights back on so that I could verify operation. Inside the beacon was a transformer for the lights that put off a loud hum when it was powered up. As soon as that transformer started buzzing, a stream of wasps started flying up from the open pipe leg that was below my crotch!
Talk about being in-between a rock and a hard place; there was no fast way off of the top of that tower w/o getting killed. Moving very slowly I radioed the engineer to turn the lights back off, and then sat there frozen for what seemed like 1o minutes until the wasps calmed down. When they mostly disappeared, I slowly put the beacon back together and then worked my way back around that top plate and back down the tower.
When I got to the ground, the engineer took one look at me and said that I looked like I’d seen a ghost. When I relayed what had happened, he was as pale as I was.
That’s one incident in my life that I would not want to relive. Surprisingly, I was not stung. Maybe the smell coming from my pants was a repellant!
When space permits, cutting an anchor is pretty much the standard way to disassemble a tower - especially one that has safety issues. We used to use a cutting torch instead of a porta band.
The crew removing that FM Radio tower appears to be from ERI (electronics Research, Inc), a FM antenna and tower manufacturing company based in Newburgh, IN. They had already removed several of the guy wires (including at the torque arms) and reduced tension on the remaining wires before they cut the anchor.
9 out of 10 towers that lose a guy anchor will end up with all of the tower sections piled up within 100’ of the base of the tower. It is extremely uncommon for a tower to fall over to the side in one piece.
That reminds me of the time that I was the most frightened that I’ve ever been in my life.
29 years ago last month I was sitting on top of the 300’ self supporting WECT tower in downtown Wilmington NC. I was in the process of replacing the tower lighting bulbs on the tower. It was a 1940’s vintage tower - somewhat similar to the one that used to appear at the beginning of the old RKO pictures releases.
After tapering from around 40’ wide at the bottom, the top 60’ of tower were a straight section - 30” face as I recall. On top of the tower was a 48” diameter solid metal plate that overhung the tower section by about a foot all of the way around. The beacon was bolted on top of that plate.
In order to change the lamps (there are 2 in the beacon), when I got to the top of the tower I had to unhook my safety, and climb past that plate so that I could sit flat on the top of it with the beacon in-between my legs. The top of the tower had pipe legs, which extended an inch or so above the plate. One of the pipe legs was right below my crotch when I was sitting on top of that plate.
After replacing the bulbs, I radioed down to the tower engineer to turn the lights back on so that I could verify operation. Inside the beacon was a transformer for the lights that put off a loud hum when it was powered up. As soon as that transformer started buzzing, a stream of wasps started flying up from the open pipe leg that was below my crotch!
Talk about being in-between a rock and a hard place; there was no fast way off of the top of that tower w/o getting killed. Moving very slowly I radioed the engineer to turn the lights back off, and then sat there frozen for what seemed like 1o minutes until the wasps calmed down. When they mostly disappeared, I slowly put the beacon back together and then worked my way back around that top plate and back down the tower.
When I got to the ground, the engineer took one look at me and said that I looked like I’d seen a ghost. When I relayed what had happened, he was as pale as I was.
That’s one incident in my life that I would not want to relive. Surprisingly, I was not stung. Maybe the smell coming from my pants was a repellant!