Flag Pole Raising

As a proud American citizen, I decided to put up a flag pole in front of my house.  So, my journey for purchasing something usually begins at Craigslist and a search engine called AdRavage (www.adravage.com).  AdRavage has helped me locate a number of great deals ranging from my garbage disposal to my engine lathe.  You simply setup a account and create a search criteria.  AdRavage will notify you via email or text message when something appears on craigslist matching your search criteria.  You can have AdRavage look as often as every 5 minutes or once/day.  Anyways, I found a guy selling old street lamp poles.  I borrowed a friends car trailer and bought it.  I'm not quite sure if I was legal or not hauling a 28 foot flag pole down the interstate, but I made it home without seeing the blue lights.

Being an engineer can be costly.  I tend to follow the motto, "When in doubt, make it stout."  So this flag pole is no exception.  It is anchored to the ground with 2400 lbs of concrete and attached with 3/4'' J-bolts.  In reality it is probably anchored appropriately if it was to be installed by the city as a light pole.  The over-kill part is that I'm making a flag pole out of a 310lb piece of steel.  Most poles are fiberglass, PVC, and the really heavy duty poles are aluminum. 

Prior to getting the pole, I was doing business with a local company for my job.  I liked their work and I hired them to sand blast and paint my flag pole.  I went with a green to match my home and shop and also it is a common color for street poles now in many cities.

Now most people would just use a rope and pulley and tie a few knots to attach the flag.  Not me, I felt the need to use stainless steel cable pulled to 50lbs of tension between two pulleys.  I was really considering doing the internal cable method by routing the cable up through the center of the pole and using a counterweight outside of the pole, but I quickly realized the cost would be much higher and my lack of time killed the idea.  I even thought of using a motorized pulley system to raise and lower the flag.

I love food and I tend to use it to lure people to my home to get man power.  Putting up this heavy pole required some heavy lifting equipment or a surplus of muscles.  The muscles route was easier and cheaper to do.  After two tries, the pole made it into position to be bolted down.  Nobody died.

The historic event in the Mercado family was captured on film and after some editing with my iMovie11 software, the video can be viewed here:  

~Mercado Engineering