get a dowel (plastic if you can) to put in the top of the mast.  get a 1/4 inch long eyebolt, assorted nuts, lockwashers, etc for both sides of the bolt end.  drill it in there, put the foldover gap of the bolt up.

good luck with that, the power companies can't get rid of theirs.

you could do like General Electric, and dump it in the Hudson... <nixon_impression> but it would be wrong.  Westinghouse had a refit station behind our offices, and it took a year to dig out and clean up the parking lot next to that building just recently.

best thing I can think of is drive in smiling to your local hazwaste pickup point, hand it over, and burn rubber all the way back home.  "hey, what's in this stuff?" "really don't know, it's old oil that I don't want.  came out of some kind of old radio stuff."  you are now legally off the hook, morally clear, and you got rid of the crud at the right place.  you didn't test it right?  let them do it.

5UP, I have a very old quote for you from Tracy Kidder... "Sex life of an electrician.  Fully excited Millie Amp moaned, 'Ohm, ohm, ohm'."

the rich ham has a few more opportunities to have new, shiny, and "hammin' land" up a hill with a good water table to make the beams and loops on the towers work better.  but they've still got to have somebody come back to have a contact.  if you don't know better, do they sound different?

as has been posted elsewhere on the site, the educational business was tanking, and I guess they underestimated the effort and overestimated how fast they could change focus and business.

not the first time somebody has basically started a business with ten bucks and found out they needed ten million.

little toy boxes don't have a heavy investment.  something like ham gear has to be overdesigned, then deconstructed to the point that a monkey who can run their finger under the line to read, do one thing, check it, and move on can succeed.  surprise! -- all the fun silicon is no longer lead-through-hole, but SMT.  this is not 12-year-old friendly like a number of us greenies needed.

don't feel cheap.  feel liberated.  they could have gotten to the 2 KW linear stage with the results being a killer flamethrower that takes down the neighborhood nuke plant.  it takes big-time work to make those safe, legal, and a successful kit.

I moved up to the Twin Cities in August, 1987, and finally had the chance to visit the Heathkit Store (Veritechnology) on White Bear Avenue.

during the shutdown sale.

when I had no money.

(phooey)

good luck with this, my friend.  sounds like you definitely need an attorney.  ask about the possibility of removing the ham stuff you stored at the site and lodging it with the attorney pending resolution, with an itemized list and your claims presented to the court.  any old wills, letters, other guys around the shack who witnessed "Yeah, ol Filbert's shack is downstairs someplace" type of conversations will need to be documented.

at this point, anything posted here could be hazardious to your rights.  you need a lawyer, and contesting a will can get to be nasty.

nope, it was always Bud Radio Co.  I think nowadays the chassis group is called Bud Products.

a considerable amount of telco gear uses pluggable hard drives, both solid-state and (late 90s design) PC card hard drives.  mostly this equipment is designed to load once and then operate, although safety-checking software exists to regularly interrogate the drive and alarm if it's missing.  otherwise, connections are wire-wrapped or punched down.  cards have very, very long pins for connectors to bus boards.

commercial/amateur construction varies all over the lot.  your old tube favorites could spit out the bottles easily.  stuff with friction plugs (usb, phono jacks) is likely to disconnect in a good temblor.  internal connectors like the fingers-to-flexboard used between modules in things like Yaekencoms will probably dislocate.

your best shot for equipment to stay operational is the ruggedized portable stuff.  the rest, depends on whether it was vibration tested to or beyond a 50G whack, or series of whacks.  most hard drives when spun down will withstand that.  running, not nearly.

consider also that building quakeproofing, if it has shock absorber pads, also has very firm limit control, so the building doesn't become a pogo stick.  if you are thinking of suspending operations desks from bungee cords or bays of those little rubber shock pads from mil surplus, you need a limit frame so the equipment doesn't rip loose and go tumbling.  each bang into the limits tests your shock resistance.

from watching the dismantling of the Safeguard anti-missle system with a news camera on my shoulder, which was built for more than earthquakes, there's a lot of hardware needed.  most of it was for the computers.  everything else was built "Army Strong."

that one looks like audio with all the electrolytics under the hood.

a whole-house surger can still let things through... Romex looking like a transmission line, and all that resonance stuff.  important items like the FT9000 should be on its own surge strip, and ideally unplugged if the skies are putting out more power than you can.

as for those lightbulbs... Byte once reported on the science of turning them into noise-emitting diodes being big overvoltage.  you'll know when they go.

Google NEBS 4.  it's the earthquake-zone standard for commercial telecom.  you can buy the printed standard from Telcordia, but I will bet it's pricey as heck.

in the baldest statement, the building floats and everything inside it is tied down so bulldozers and dymanite can't move it.  it all interlocks, too, to functionally cross-brace everything.

if you don't have the home built to earthquake standards with cross-trussing and all that, the best you can do is strap down the radios and bolt down the table.  myself, I'd do the old dive out the door and hug the ground trick.  without the structure having been built to earthquake zoning, you don't have anything solid to start with to lock equipment down.

a pinch of this and a touch of that, and you have a government.  as in dieting, balance and moderation is the key to keeping one sane.

there is a lot of stuff and nonsense, probably coming from merger and acquisition weasels in Wall Street banks, that seems to have infected the common man.  it can be identified by "bigbucks should buy loserco because...".

methinks this falls into the same category.

why should some successful outfit that has no need for a bankrupt collapse due to market changes burn billions of dollars saving investors who made a bad choice, hopefully with their eyes open?  they could instead burn billions of dollars in trash cans on street corners on a cold night, and warm up the poor and oppressed.

the answer, of course, is that M&A weasels can skim a couple hundred million off.

there is no really good reason to revive the Heathkit name, frankly.  I liked the stuff, it's gone, I can't build any more of it now, and that's the story.  they got a lot of hams on the air, as did World Radio Labs and EICO.  there are other options.

fix the old stuff when you find a bargain if you like tubes.  but I can't see a Heathkit of a Yaekencom that costs $400 more and needs a ton of SMC stuff and a binocular magnifier.  especially since I can't get around to replacing the trimmer in my FT890.

Bud, like Stancor, did once produce some simple amateur products, either kit or assembled.  I'm pretty sure Bud made a parlor transmitter, which you could use to broadcast your own audio through the house, back in the black-crackle-is-pretty days.

also called a Colorado connector, it's a ground splice that is a sliding contact inside a copper U.  GB has them in blister packs, for one supplier.  several sizes.