The COUBA Bilby Tower is now in Indiana.
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These photos are from April 30, 2012, when Surveyors Historical Society extracted the tower by boat. The tower will eventually be re-erected in Osgood, Indiana as a memorial to Jasper Sherman Bilby.
very cool
Great photos! It's a wonderful project. I hope we can see it in its new home someday.
Congratulations.
That was a very sensible time of year in South Louisiana to do it!
How long did disassembly take, and how long do you think it takes to put back up?
Bilby tower
A tower used in triangulation and consisting of two braced tripods, one within the other, constructed, according to the design of J. S. Bilby, so that an observer on a platform at the top of the outer tripod can move about without disturbing an instrument mounted on the top of the inner tripod. The Bilby tower was put into use in 1927 and is standard equipment in triangulation done by the U. S. National Geodetic Survey. The tower can easily be put up, taken down, and moved to a new location. It is also durable. Because the original Bilby tower and most subsequent ones of that design have been built of steel, the tower is often referred to as the Bilby steel tower.
Source: http://www.termwiki.com/EN:Bilby_tower
> How long did disassembly take, and how long do you think it takes to put back up?
>
It took about 7 hours to disassemble the tower, which I didn’t think was too bad for a crew that had never heard of a Bilby tower before they took on this job. I was only there for one day. Some of the crew stayed another day and made a couple more 2-hour round trips in the boat to haul the steel out and load it on a trailer for the trip to Indiana.
I have no idea how long it will take to put it back together. I understand we have an offer from a tech school to have their students straighten, clean and re-galvanize the steel before we start re-assembly. We also have some leads on some of the people who actually did this for the USC&GS back in the day. If we can get one or more of them to supervise, it might go a lot smoother. Time will tell.
US C&GS Manual for Bilby Tower Spcl Pub 158 (1940) gives specifications and some discussion of assembly and use. There's also a 1929 edition.
I'd like to have a bilby tower,
N
I never could resist climbing one. Not that difficult, and great views.
here is a former USC&GS k+e collimator...
on ebay (as mentioned in Bill's link):
Status of the Bilby Tower?
How is that project coming along?
Howdy,
Nice photos. I must have missed this thread when first posted. Or don't remember that far back.
For videos on tower construction in the 70's see Lehman's videos on YouTube. They come up first on Google video search for Bilby Tower. This removal project is shown in a nice video at: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wgbAIm1PeEw&feature=plcp
Never worked on the towers myself. I do miss the days when surveying involved mountain peaks and other elevated viewpoints. Using monuments along roadways, not so much.
BTW, Gilbert Mitchell mentioned in this thread has retired as I imagine most with Bilby tower experience at NGS.
Cheers,
DMM