Tower Repair Finale

The tower is repaired and back up.  It's even more or less vertical and I didn't have to tear up the work I've done already to get it into place.  I just had to walk back and forth between the east side of the house and the shop on the west side about a million and six times for that one size wrench, socket, or drill bit that I didn't have, or that thing I didn't even think I might need.  

Those of you in the southeast US watching the tropics know that there's a broad area from just north of Puerto Rico and Hispaniola (the island containing the Dominican Republic/Haiti), stretching north up over and east of the Bahamas up to around Cape Canaveral.  Even farther north as you go farther offshore. The NHC says there's a good chance that will develop into either a tropical storm or a non-tropical cyclone, all of which means there's a chance that it goes from a rainy/messy week to a storm that forces me to crank over the tower again.  More on that later.

But first, here's the leg that was broken and mangled repaired with the tube up inside the leg, held in place by two 1/4-20 stainless bolts at 90 degrees to each other and offset center-to-center by one inch.  

Anybody here a mechanical engineer?  The strength in bending is proportional to the moment of inertia of the tube.  The existing 1.50" OD tube has a polar MOI of 0.068 in^4.  The tube sticking out of the bottom of that tube has an MOI of 0.097 in^4.  Smaller OD but thicker walls.

The angle aluminum is new for general purposes; the old piece had undergone some corrosion and it seemed prudent to replace it.  The angle is held by another 1/4-20 stainless bolt and locking hardware.  In the slab itself is a 3/8" bolt with a stainless nut on it which had also suffered some corrosion but running a threading die over that cleaned up the threads and made it so the nut threads all the way down to surface of the concrete slab.  

This is that area with the tower cranked up and bolted in place to the house bracket. The two holes that get bolts through them are drilled with the "loose clearance" size recommended on standard threading charts, about 1/64 of an inch larger in diameter than the bolt size.  By loosening the 1/4-20 bolt on the tower leg, it easily allowed me to lower the tower into place. 

The house bracket and the 2x4 that clamps the tower to that bracket was fussy and made me walk back and forth for different hardware the most.  

I think this needs to be replaced and I've been telling myself for years to make an alternative out of aluminum bar stock in the shop.  I end up replacing the wood 2x4 every couple of years, and it's annoying.  In the big picture, as has been talked about here often, I don't want to use a house bracket and I'm seriously studying how to emulate mounting pole concept that Aluma (the tower manufacturer) uses.

Finally; an overview.

By the time I finished this up yesterday, it was too late to spend any time looking at the antennas, so I did that today.  It turns out the antenna I repaired, the bigger one on the bottom in this view, was at least as good as before the elements snapped off, but the smaller antenna visible above it was markedly worse.  Ironically, I never swept that antenna when the tower was cranked over because it looked fine.  For those who understand this, the swept VSWR went from 1.1 or 1.2:1 up to over 5:1.  It's rather strange.  

The short version of the story, though, might well be that with the messy weather coming up that might turn uglier, maybe the answer is to crank the tower back over so I can access the back end of the antenna.  When I put that antenna up last January , I worked on it by turning the antennas to point south which puts the connector closest to the ground.  In this picture, it's pointed north.

I don't see anything about cranking it back over again for another week that would be negative. Thanks again to the people who suggested fixes and approaches that helped me converge on a way to get this done.