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Now for the upper section of tower. Three straps again, and you can see that the mast is inside the tower, with two heavy duty muffler clamps holding it on top of the thrust bearing. The red thing at the left is the steel ball from the crane ... the blue thing at the right is my father-in-law.
The upper 40 feet atop the lower 30 feet. That adds up to 70 feet of sheer beauty, right?
Compared with installing the first section to the base, the upper section was much more difficult to join to the lower section. The wind didn't help, of course, but the biggest problem was that the upper section was being held pretty far off vertical (maybe the straps weren't equal length) and it was really difficult to get all three legs seated properly. Both Gary and I weren't sure we were going to be able to finish the connection, but as you can see we finally got the bolts in place.
The
rated fully extended length of this particular crane is 127 feet.
Let's see now ... what do those numbers say? By setting up
in the driveway where it was flatter, the crane ended up 90 feet away
from the tower base and needed every bit of available boom to install
the upper section. Needless to say, the crane operator had some
difficulty with the wind gusts and probably had reservations of
his own.
