Wood Utility Pole DimensionsUtility poles are ubiquitous. They are everywhere carrying electricity to homes and business along with also carrying telephone, cable news and even music before MTV stopped that, telegraph at one time and who knows what else. We modelers could and simply select a wooden dowel that looks about right, stick on some cross-arms and go about our business. That is a bit hard for me .. my Persnickety kicks in. To that end here is some research for those with my condition. WoodPoles.corg has a bunch of downloadable files including an Excel file – ANSI Dimensions for Wood Poles. They also have a nice calculator for Pole Dimensions. “The load-carrying capacity of wood poles is determined by its dimensions, length and amount of taper from top to bottom. ANSI national standards, developed by the ASC O5 Committee, define poles in classes based on these dimensions and the species.” To determine the required circumferences the calculator uses pull-down menus to select the Species, Pole Class and Length. The minimum top and bottom circumferences, as defined under ANSI standards, will then be shown.
For we modelers this means that modeling Distribution poles is most common meaning Class 5,4 and 3. Example of use .. plugging in a Class 3, Southern Yellow Pine with a 40ft length into the calculator gives us a pole with a 23″ circumference of 23″ at the top and 36″ circumference 6′ from the butt. Changing the Class to 5 gives a 19″ and 31″ circumference respectively In O scale then the Class 3 pole would be 7.3″ and `11.5″ – or 0.15″ and 0.24″. This gives a guide as we can then simply take a 1/4″ dowel and taper it to approximately that 0.15″ dimension at the top.
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