WVDXA SOS -- need muscle tomorrow 1:00 PM

[w8hc at aol.com]

Well, I should first thank the guys that came by today to help me drop my tower and troubleshoot the erratic SWR problem at high power that suddenly cropped up last week on the 40-meter portion of the Force 12 C4SXL.   Dave WA8WV and Pete K4OM had no trouble seeing the "blue arc" when I cranked the drive to the Alpha to 800 watts with the antenna laying over on its side.  The problem was in the fiber glass insulating rod, part of the linear loading section of the driven element, that we taped prior to installation to keep UV from breaking down the fiber glass.  We did that 4 years ago when we put it together.  Somehow, moisture must've gotten in there and oxidation took place to create a low enough resistance to find a path at high power.  The path was at least 2 inches.  So the good news was we didn't have to replace the balun or the coax.
 
The bad news was that we weren't "gentle" enough when we tilted the Aluma tower over and the Force 12 took a nice jolt when it hit the ground.  Actually, the problem was that we didn't have enough muscle to properly walk the the tower over.  It got "away" from us.  There was only 5 of us and at 54, I was the youngest OT of the bunch.  To make matters worse, we didn't have enough horsepower to put the thing back up after doing the other maintenance.  
 
So, I am looking for a couple of strong able-bodied (young?) hosses to help us tomorrow at 1:00pm to raise this thing back up.  I have one more bit of fixing to do with a couple of rivets on one of the 10-meter elements and it shouldn't take but a couple minutes to raise this thing up if we have enough oooomph.
 
So I am putting out a call for 1:00pm Sunday if you are available.  Please let me know if possible.  
 
Oh, the 5-element 6-meter Cushcraft is now in the place of the 2 meter beam at the top of the mast. We did get that taken care of too.  So c'mon 6-meter opening!  (after I get the tower back up, of course)
 
Thanks for any and ALL help.....  My thanks to WA8WV, W8OI, K4OM, and KB8TGH today!  Clancy enjoyed it guys.
 
73,
Hal W8HC 
________________________________________________________________________
Check out the new AOL.  Most comprehensive set of free safety and security tools, free access to millions of high-quality videos from across the web, free AOL Mail and more.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/wvdxa_wvdxa.org/attachments/20061209/61543447/attachment.html