Mishaps

Trying to let a tower down is much more difficult than to pull it up; because going up, if a problem starts, most of the time you can stop and fix it, but coming down, when a problem starts it gets out of control very fast and down she comes. So considering how cheap the towers are to build, it's safer to just drop them. When you drop them on flat ground, it is fast, safe and most, if not all, of the tower can be used again.

I let a 150' foot tower down the other day using a hand winch witch takes a long time and is hard work, but this time I am going to let this 200' tower down the easy way using my truck. I have the gin pole laying out and lifted a few feet, with all six guy wires connected to the top of the gin pole and the temporary side guys also tied to the top. I was using the lift pole to lift the gin pole up near the balance point . I then went out to the truck and connected to the bumper and allowed my self some slack; and I thought I had only a little more to go to reach the balance point, but I left too much slack so when the tower went past the balance point the tower free fell for about 40 degrees and when the slack was all taken up the tower was falling too fast and it buckled the gin pole right at my feet. Now you can see that this kind of work can be dangerous.