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2026.03.28 AE0TB tower takedowns:


After Tom (AE0TB) passed away, his widow Vicky decided to move to a senior living facility and so the towers
at the house need to come down. We went over one Saturday, hoping to take both of them down but there was a
lot of stuff on the steel tower, and the aluminum tower (which we started on first) turned out to have some very
stubbornly stuck sections that took quite a lot of time and effort to separate.

After finally getting the aluminum tower completely taken down, we didn't have enough time to finish the steel
tower, but did get most of the other hardware off the tower. We'll have another go at it next Friday, where
hopefully we can get the last of the tower clutter down and drop all the sections.

We ended up needing to use my mechanical advantage kit to give the ground crew enough lifting power to wrench
the 3rd section from the 2nd. The sections had stuck together pretty firmly and the thin aluminum legs and
cross-members got pretty bent up as we forced them apart.

We returned on Friday April 3 to get the other tower down. It was a bit of a scramble because the weather was
threatening rain and this was our last foreseeable opportunity to do tower work before the towers had to be
down for the new owners of the house. I chatted with Mark (N8TWO) the morning of the event and we made a last-
minute decision to rush out there ahead of schedule to try to beat the rain.

The initial plan was to just take off the TV antenna and drop the top section with the top tower piece, but the
top mast was much longer than I had recalled so the top mast with antenna were taken off by themselves first.

The night before I had fabricated some wood plates to use with the tower jack to accelerate the separating of
tower sections since the furniture clamp is slow to work with. The plates worked, although the wood was weak
and they split along the grain as was somewhat expected. I was still able to separate the sections quickly though
since the lower plate could stay in place, leaving the jack to be scooted to another leg and supported above
with the broken half of another plate. (the plates were breaking due to a combination of trying to jack up from
the center and the weak grained wood lacking support in the center)

We barely had enough time to get the top two sections dropped before having to sprint to get gear out of sudden
heavy rainfall. We returned ater getting lunch at Nana Rose's to remove the house bracket and tip over the
remaining two sections, which separated pretty easily once on the ground. We got chased by another intense
downpour as we were finishing packing up.



mechanical advantage kit (in accessories)

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2026.03.28 15.13.43.MOV (52 MB)

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