Flagpole
Posted: Wed Sep 25, 2024 7:36 pm
I've had many of the aluminum flag poles and even after reinforcing them with PVC pipe and EMT they just don't stand up to the Nebraska wind. So many around here use oil well stem pipe, so I thought I'd give it a try. Since this stuff weighs over 5lbs a foot I went to my phone company tricks. We'd set phone poles (no more than 25 feet) off the back of a truck using the legs of a ladder on the ladder rack. We put a board in the hole for the pole to slide down and back the truck up to set it in the hole, worked pretty slick. I don't have such a truck, so I used a Keller heavy duty multi ladder setting the pole side at a steeper angle than the back of the ladder. I set the ladder on some plywood so it would slide easier and braced the bottom of the ladder so the legs would pull evenly. Hooked chains to the ladder and connected them to my chain hoist which was connected to my pickup hitch. I had the chain hoist just a bit higher on the ladder than the hitch to keep a downward pull on the legs of the ladder. Just as an added precaution I drove T-post on each side of the ladder and tied it off so the ladder wouldn't tip as the ladder's working height is 8ft and the oil stem pipe was 26 feet, which about 4 feet was going in the ground. So, I think that's a pretty good picture of how I did it and it worked fine but was slow going since I kept an eye on everything as I went. Not as easy as backing a truck up but I couldn't have set it any other way without renting some pretty expensive equipment. Thanks for starting this forum, I think many will get some ideas.
