somewhere on the mountain: The Tower is Up!

Yesterday afternoon was my day. I had to work until 3, and then we were to try to lift the tower after that. A last-minute call cancelled my work day so we could start the lift after lunch. A blessing because, since the project required 5 hours, we never would have made it had we started at 3.

Only Terry could come, all my other helpers were busy. Terry and I thought we could do it alone, but turned out there was no way we could. We needed help and, what do you know, Mark and his son Sam showed up.

As I crawled the crane over to the foundation, I could have easily been off to the right or left by inches or even feet, but things were lined up perfectly.

And, lastly, the myriad things that could have gone wrong that I wasn't even aware of...didn't.

Well, most everything didn't. We had one false start: After getting everything hooked up, looked over and ready to go, I proceeded to begin lifting the tower. I got it up halfway, about 45 degrees, and, all of a sudden, the end of the tower on the ground began rolling. Being round, and there being just enough of a slope, it took off, cartwheeling downhill. And the top chain connection between crane boom and tower has a pivot in it, so it merely spun 'round and 'round, letting the big long cylinder of a tower do whatever the heck it wanted to do. I sat there in the crane, jaw agape watching the unimaginable take place before my eyes.

Then things go exciting. Since the tower end was now rolling downhill, the momentum of the whole thing was swinging my crane boom over sideways. This put my weight out over the side of the tracks rather than in the front. Now I was too heavy and began to tip--not over completely, but enough to really get my attention.

Well, after we began breathing again and took a break to assess the situation, we lowered the tower top end until it was just barely off the ground, and then used the backhoe to push the tower base back up to where it was supposed to be. And you can bet that we also made sure the base would not do the big roll again.

After that it was pretty straightforward. A little iffy traveling the crane with the tower suspended in the air. But, slowly, slowly, we got it there, in place and down on the bolt stubs.

Here we are using the back hoe to hold the back end of the crane down because, as we needed to boom out a bit more, the tower was too heavy for the crane and, without the extra weight of the backhoe, we were getting pretty darn tippy!