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Ahh,
Thanks for the answer guys,
Over here, the stay wire is wrapped around the pole twice and then wrapped into the stay wire itself.

Mike,

Here's a picture which gives a better view of this type of guy-wire arrangement:

Over here the guy wire comes out a bit lower down the pole and goes out at a much wider angle than that.

In some mountainous areas it may be more than one wire too.

It's very rare to see a crooked electricity pole, however, the old wooden telephone poles here are being very badly maintained by eircom since privatisation.

They've their multicore distribution cables strung along them in rural areas and in some remote spots the poles are quite litterally falling apart.

Back in the 1970s & 1980s (pre-privatisation) they dug trenches and layed ducts along the edges of fields (i.e. beside the "ditch") and these carry optic fibers as well as bundles of phonelines. The overhead stuff generally only carrys smaller bundles of pairs out to customers and to be fair, despite the fact that it's strung along rather loosely, it doesn't seem to cause any faults.

I just think it's a pity to see the old poles deteroriate and be replaced by steel. The wooden ones look much nicer and are more sympathetic to their sorroundings.

Talking of Irish telephone poles. You probably didn't realise it but it was the Irish Post Office that discovered the very large Lisheen zinc deposit.

They were replacing a badly leaning telephone pole and on pulling the old one out found lots of orangy-black crystals coating the rotton wood. It turned out to be sphalerite - zinc sulphide - and an important ore of the metal. Oh the luck of the Irish!

It's alloy weight to Tipperary!

P&T (Post and Telegraphs) were possibly one of the most useless organisations in history.

It's a good thing they discovered something !

They were abolished in the early 1980s due to their complete inability to do either of their core functions. The mail was always late and the phones never worked.

Despite their tens of thousands of employees (there were only a few people who didn't work for P&T) they were taking up to 2 years to install a phoneline. Businesses were going bust because they couldn't get access to decent telecommunications infrastructure. Phone charges were astronomically high and they were on strike most of the time.

It reached a national crisis level by the early 1980s and the whole organisation was scrapped. Telecom Eireann (now eircom) established and the whole network digitalised in a very short space of time.

So, obviously "the lads" were out digging holes in the ground and doing amature geology when they were suppoed to be putting up a phoneline!



Apparently a team of at least 3 guys would arrive to install an extension socket.

There was a theory in the late 1970s that P&T actually had more employees than working telephone lines!

[This message has been edited by djk (edited 05-14-2005).]

Interesting picture Paul.
Reason I say that is, because any force on the guy wire would be borne by the end of that bracket, not by the guy-wire as it should be.
Just my opinion.

Trumpy, you're right. As the anchor point gets closer to the pole, the force the staywire has to apply to check pole-top movement increases exponentially. I think this is done simply to get a better fix on the stay-to-pole top by making the angle more acute, while keeping the base area of pole and stay in as small an 'envelope' as practical. This is ok, as long as the wire is stressed within its elastic limit and the anchor is firm enough to take the load.
The 'bracket' simply gets a compressive load, and is stressed-out as a strut.
Alan