Running Late, So Tower Repair Update

I had started working on an idea that's turning into a Smallest Minority-style "uberpost" and it's looking like there's no way I can finish that in time, so a couple of quick updates on the tower work, simply because I can write this off the top of my head.  The task is turning into a bigger, more involved fix than I really wanted to work on.  Thankfully, it turned into fall back in September - kind of unusual for us - and it's not that bad working outside.  

The majority of the work this past week has been completing the tool that I intended to use to clamp around the tower legs and try to make the one leg round again.  Or, at least, rounder.  

The finished tool.  That's a little over 2" long, 1-7/8" square block of gray cast iron that was machined there on the mill.  It was painfully slow to do, for two reasons.  First off, I find cast iron to be a bitch to machine.  It goes beyond dirty to filthy in the chips it throws.  Second, the sheer size of it made getting tools onto the milling machine far more tedious than usual.  When I used my boring head, I could cut about a .050 radius to full depth either by CNC at 1 inch/minute or cut by hand, as long as vacuumed out the cast iron chips often. 

Why the mill and not my big lathe?  I still have the piston from my 1 by 1 engine on it that I haven't finished (and haven't worked on for a host of other times sinks) that's a position sensitive setup.  I really need to finish that.  "All I gotta do" is finish the two channels for the piston rings - so that I can get it off the big lathe and get access to it.  

The tool clamped onto a round section of the tower leg.

My approach was to slide that tool closer to the obvious kink in the tube and clamp down on it, reshaping the tower leg a few thousandths at a time.  It worked to some degree, but when I went to get a bigger, apparently stronger C-clamp, I did something I've never done; something I didn't even know was possible to do.  The clamp you see there opens to 3" and I replaced it with a 4" clamp.  

I bent it.  By hand.  Just by tightening the clamping action bare handed - not with a "half inch breaker bar."  

Then I went got the even bigger 5" C-clamp.  For that one, I got a short length of pipe to help me tighten the clamping screw.  That bent the handle on the clamping screw.  I took my jigsaw to the that clamp and cut it apart because with the screw bent to 90 degrees, it was impossible to loosen.  I might have found a way around cutting the clamp screw in half, but I had pretty much burned up every nanogram of patience I have by then.

The smaller clamp on the right is bent down close to the handle.  The top of the clamp, lower right, is no longer aligned with the other screw; it's about 1/4" off the table and it closes with the two clamping surfaces out of alignment.  You can see the damage on the one on the left. 

As I've mentioned before somewhere, the tower leg is bent over it's bottom two inches.  

In the second picture you can see a slot in the tube below that bend. I'm sorta following a procedure here that's like an anonymous comment to my last post.  To the previous posts, several people suggested tapering a steel bar and driving that up that leg to both open it back up and straighten it.  I intend to try that with a back up of cutting off that bottom ~ 2" and putting a smaller, heavier wall tube into it's place.  

If end up cutting off the bottom two inches and attaching a smaller tube inside this one, I can use the existing fastener in the concrete slab with some luck.  If I'm using this leg, I'll avoid that slot and drill a new bolt hole perpendicular to the axis of that one; across the tube from this viewing angle.  Either way, I'm replacing the small piece of angle aluminum (2"x2"x1/4" thick).  If I drill perpendicular to that slot, I might put identical pieces of angle aluminum on both sides of the leg and two new fasteners in the concrete slab it's sitting on.