This is a Cushcraft 5 element 6 meter yagi, another fatality of my tower crash back in April 2016. I'm getting things repaired and reinstalled, slowly but surely. We joked around on the air and called all of my Cushcraft antennas... Crushcraft, since they were all crushed in the tower failure.
Today I pulled all of the parts of the 6m yagi from the antenna wreckage pile, and began disassembling everything. Some stuff was bent, so I straightened those items and put them to the side. One of the elements (1st director) was actually straight... I couldn't believe it, considering the condition of everything else. Here are a few pics of the first evening's work...
This is pile, after it was pulled from the tree and tower wreckage about 2 years ago...
I laid it out in the back yard to figure out the component layout prior to complete disassembly...
Broken stuff...
...more broken stuff...
..and more broken stuff.
The driven element is in foul condition...
The boom mount and element supports were twisted and/or broken along the length of the boom...
I began work on the boom...it was bent up pretty good...
I employed my red neck tubing straightener that I've used before... a pair of twin trees in the woods behind my house. Trees work pretty good for this, their surface is soft and doesn't tend to wrinkle or crimp the tubing at the points of contact while straightening it. I first straightened a motorcycle crash bar in those trees about 15 years ago...
Here's the boom...nice and straight!
The 1st director was warped up a bit, so off to the red neck tubing straightener it goes...
...and it comes out nice and straight! Next, I have to pick up a short piece of tubing to make splices for the broken elements. More on that in the next blog update...
Dave WB4IUY
http://www.WB4IUY.net
