I spent a few days down at SJ2W with my girlfriend. I got some more stuff done on the house. It goes pretty quickly now when I know how to do everything. Now I need to get the door and remove the roof over the stairs so I can continue and hopefully finish up the house work during my first week of vacation. SM2UVU came by on Sunday with some stuff he had gotten laser cut for the 60m tower we took down in Moskojärvi. That tower has got OH8QD first design of guy rings which tended to freeze up since water got into them in the winter which turned into ice. So I will change those rings to a design similar to OH8LQ (http://www.oh8lq.com) but with some minor changes that SM2UVU has done to the design. The quality of the laser cut pieces is just plain amazing, won’t even need to grind it!

Next weekend me and SM2NOG are off to SM2OAN to put up 36m OH8QD tower and antennas. The week after that I’ll spend time helping a friend to build on his house but after that I plan to be at SJ2W for a few weeks and hopefully get a lot of stuff done.

So stay tuned…

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I did some work in the lathe. First yesterday I did some fitting for SM2OAN that he will use on his winch which turned out pretty well made in brass. Today I did some work in steel which I have not done since I was 14 years old, some 17 years ago, but after some help from a colleague it went well. The gear for the military tower project has got an inner diameter of 60mm and the inner diameter of the worm gear for the rotor has got 30mm so I need to make a transfer between those two dimensions. I will also put a bearing on the top side of it so the stress on the worm gear is reduced.

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Today I finished up the antenna parts for the 40m element plates. So left to do before we can send them away to get galvanized is making the attachment plates for the two 40m yagis, two 20m yagis and the 30m yagi as well. I need to measure a bit on the tower where I will position them, since the top 10m tapers in a bit I need to get the bolt pattern correct for the height they should be placed at. Also some details are left to be done on the 40m tower base, such as attaching the rotor after I’ve gotten the plate from SM2UVU.

I wish I did get hold of cheap stainless steel clamps for all the antennas but unfortunately they are just too expensive so I will go with the galvanized ones. It would be OK if it was just one antenna, but now with 5 of them the cost gets too high. Those clamps hold anyway but it’s a bit boring when things rust. I might put some coating on them.

Anybody have a MIG welder lying around that they don’t use? I really need one…

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Today I continued my work on the fabrication of the antenna hardware. I drilled the hole pattern in the 40m element plates and also welded the element guy support. I would not really need vertical guylines on the 40m elements because they are made from 60mm tubing in the middle, but it’s pretty much for free to add it and then it should hold up for more snow or ice loading if disaster strikes.

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