TV Aerial Repairs www.andysaerials.com

TV Aerial Repairs www.andysaerials.com

It doesn’t look it in the attached picture but it was bitterly cold that morning, once your gloves are wet and it is cold we couldn’t feel our fingers!  Our customer had called us as their aerial was falling down and in need of putting up again. When we arrived I looked at the single chimney cradle supporting the mast with a TV aerial, FM aerial, D.A.B aerial and a satellite dish, no wonder it was falling over!  We decided to provide another large chimney cradle to strengthen the aerial mast and system, only problem was our customer’s large chimney stack as it was enormous!

TV Aerial Repairs www.andysaerials.com

We scratched our head for a while wondering how we could get another large chimney cradle at the top of the chimney stack above the one which was already there.  We could have easily of fitted a large cradle beneath the existing one but the aerial would have had to be dropped down and as our customer was happy with the signal provided by their aerial we wanted to get our cradle and lashing kit at the top of their chimney stack and keep the existing signal levels.  Our triple extension ladders easily reaches 3 story building, but this chimney stack was higher and our triple ladders just got us up there.

TV Aerial Repairs www.andysaerials.com

This was defiantly a 2man job, and with one on top of the chimney stack and another at the top of the ladder we were able to get the lashing wire around the chimney stack, and attach the chimney cradle.  Fitting the chimney corner plates under the lashing wire at the 3 chimney corners was as much fun as getting the lashing wire around the chimney stack!  Our next problem was tightening the J bolts which attach the lashing wire to the chimney cradle, ordinarily we put our cutters under the J bolt as we tighten the lashing wire to prevent the J bolt spinning 360degrees, on this occasion it took one of us at the base of the roof by the chimney holding the wire cutters at the J bolt while the other team member laid on top of the chimney stack tightening the J bolt tightening the lashing wire.  After considerable effort we had managed to secure our large chimney cradle at the top of our customer’s large chimney stack, all we had to do now was fit the 2 large U bolts through our customer’s mast and securely attach the mast to our new chimney cradle.  We tightened our customer’s existing chimney cradle and got back down to the ground and packed away.  We couldn’t wait to get back in our van and get the heating going as we were both frozen!  As always our customer was delighted with our work, we wrote our bill and set off to our next job.