After a review of several issues amongst ourselves we:
- Redid the tower connections without washers on the 3 towers assembled so far, to better seat the bolts on the Nylock nut threads
- Tamped down soil under the bases for the 3x 35' towers (this required lowering 20' of ue that had been erected)
- Doubled up a few more screw anchors for the 35' towers
- Flipped the guy wire attachment point on ue's 30' section, which now makes it loose, but not stressing the diagonal braces.
- Since it was down, we attached the 30' section to ue along with the permanent guy wires and successfully raised it with 4 people
- HOWEVER, as we were tensioning just the temp rope guy, one of the screw anchors snapped. Fortunately, we had a second screw anchor in place to resecure this guy, but in the end we decided to abandon the screw anchors (at least the used ones that we have here) and plan on using Mantas instead. We lowered ue back down again.
- We added guy wires to d.
- We decided that erecting a 35' tower fully assembled would be workable.
Thus, ue, uw, and d are all at the same state of having 30' assembled on the ground, attached to a secure tilting base plate, and with permanent guys attached. We can add the top 5' to each of these to finish up. However, they can't be erected until we have guy anchor points that we are happy with. We will retry Manta installation tomorrow with the remaining parts that are needed that Bob is bringing tonight.
We also assembled 20' of tower c (which does not have a tilting base plate) on the ground. Again, it is waiting for guy anchor points to start going vertical.
We left the site at 12:30, having worked through intermittent rain.
Tony and William are on the way to Gunnison to return the UHaul.