Telescopic Tower

[LEXX]

I would like to make a tower which is light weight, telescopes down into a 10' to 12' pole, is 40' tall when extended, guyed, strong enough to support a 7' prop, and is reasonably inexpensive to build.  Of course 4 out of 6 ain't bad.  I would also like to build it so that it is slightly mobile so that i could move it from location to location to show people (mostly family) how much wind is actually at their houses and encourage them to go a little green.  i am thinking of decreasing diameter round pipes inside each other with stops to keep them from coming apart when fully extended, the raising mechanism could be a large removable hand crank type system with pulleys (will post a bad drawing tomorrow when I have more time), all that would be needed would be some permanent anchors to guy it, this would be ok because hopefully they would be interested in getting a larger permanent system later on.  I was thinking that if it wasn't too hard or expensive to build might be a good idea for permanent type systems as well for ease of servicing and setup.

Any help appreciated,

LEXX

[Victor]

If you are going to use permanent anchors anyway why not use a tiltup tower . I'm certain a tilt up would be lighter, more easily transported, simpler, and cheaper.

 Thats 4 out of 6 isn't it?

 NRG at www.NRG systems.com has towers that break down to 7' pieces

They may be a little pricey to buy but you may be able to glean some ideas from their design. By the way their wish list is very similar to yours as their business is wind survey equipment which is often installed for  relativly  short periods of time.

[tecker]

  We used such a thing when I worked for uncle bud ,for radio antenna it used a main shaft and the links had a pulley on the bottom of each and and two on the top of each

extension . with  boat type wench to take it up . we let out the guy cable as it went up each section had it's own set of guy cables.