Holdman Star in the Wind

[Gary]

I was thinking of making a Holdman Star for next year. Looking at the instructions on the web site at You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login, I just wonder how stable the star would be in high winds.

We've had winds in the valley where I live area about 60 mph with gusts even higher. It seems that the flat surface is prone to catching the wind. How have others around here held it down on their roof?

[taybrynn]

I don't know if I'd risk it with a history of winds that high.

I remember reading about a person in Vegas who has a holdman star fly off the roof in 80mph gust.

Personally, I was pretty worried the first couple year, cause my Holdman start is larger, being a full 8' tall
and 4' wide.  Now that I've seen it through 40mph winds without a hitch, I don't worry as much ... and I know from
my onsite weather station that 30-40 is the highest winds I've seen each year and those are not sustained.

But you have to accept that fact that it could blow off, since mother nature has a way of letting you know whos boss
sometimes.

That said, I think holdman put around 3 50-60lb bags on it his ... and I've been doing 8 or 9 bags on mine
and my frame is rebar and probably another 70 lbs itself.  I personally think a lot of people put far too little weight on
these things and most get away with it.  I'm talking about people putting 20-30 lbs up there ... way too little!

I had it on my main roof the first year and moved
it down to a partially sheltered gable over the front door since.

Now I worry more about the megatree blowing over or the pole breaking ... but so far, so good.

My star stand rides the roof like a giant saddle ... and I think its a tad more stable that way, because the winds
here would tend to blow W->E and that would be very hard to tip with all that friction and weight ... and steel.
I have thought about possibly putting hole in the middle of it, but then it might become more flimsy and looks-wise
it would be worse during the day.

Since I used to be a big wind surfer, I know how power a tiny sail can be in a large wind ... thats what worries me,
so I still think I consider making it fence or ground mounted if you have winds that strong.

[SteveMaris]

That was my main concern prior to making mine. I decided to make a wire frame 3d star, based off of a design I found online.  I figure it not being solid, will keep it on the roof here in the "Windy City"

[trekster]

2010 was my first show.  I made the Holdman star.  I was worried but it stayed on the roof.  We had gusts of 45+ one day here in Oklahoma.  With four 60 pound sand bags and the weight of the star and frame it is pushing around 300 lbs.  The frame hugs the roof pitch and it sets very solid!  If you make the frame like his (I did), there is plenty of room for 2 more bags to fit onto the frame.  That would be 400 lbs.   I feel mine could have hit 60mph winds and been OK.  That is my son putting the star up.  I let him do all the roof work.

Ron

[mmulvenna]

That was my main concern prior to making mine. I decided to make a wire frame 3d star, based off of a design I found online.  I figure it not being solid, will keep it on the roof here in the "Windy City"

I agree, a wire-frame would survive the wind a lot better. Here in Phoenix anything the the Holdman star would get blown over so any designs like that that I plagiarize are redesigned to use wire-frames.

[mike2tall]

Christmas-leds has a wire frame version available. Here is the link to it:

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Mike

[inzeos]

It looks like with the plywood version of the Holdman Star there are many places you could take a jig or hole saw to, which would make the decoration a little less prone to becoming a sail.

[taybrynn]

Great picture. 

I was also thinking of putting the hole in the middle because it would give a place to grab the star in the middle, when carrying, which could be handy?

[Gary]

That was my main concern prior to making mine. I decided to make a wire frame 3d star, based off of a design I found online.  I figure it not being solid, will keep it on the roof here in the "Windy City"

Do you or does anybody else have a web link to the plans of what they built using a metal frame instead?

Something that I like about the Holdman star being made out of wood is that with the drilled holes, the lights are nicely spaced giving it an overall neat and organized appearance. How do people mount the lights straight every time on the wire frame? The C7 LED strings I have for the project have caps that can be removed.

[SteveMaris]

Here is a link to the thread.
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I will try to get a picture of mine on here later.

[mmulvenna]

That was my main concern prior to making mine. I decided to make a wire frame 3d star, based off of a design I found online.  I figure it not being solid, will keep it on the roof here in the "Windy City"

Do you or does anybody else have a web link to the plans of what they built using a metal frame instead?

Something that I like about the Holdman star being made out of wood is that with the drilled holes, the lights are nicely spaced giving it an overall neat and organized appearance. How do people mount the lights straight every time on the wire frame? The C7 LED strings I have for the project have caps that can be removed.

Wire-frame with Rope light would look great IMHO...I converted all of my wire-frames
 to rope light this past year.

[mokeefe]

Wire-frame with Rope light would look great IMHO...I converted all of my wire-frames
 to rope light this past year.

Did you find a good source for the rope lights or was it an after Christmas sale purchase?  Did you use the 1/2" or 3/8" rope?

-Mike

[mmulvenna]

I used 3/8, it conforms better and I bought about 2000 feet of white from another user. I painted where I need colors.


This is a 40 foot long 10 piece wire-frame. These are the initial test from last year so there is some stuff missing and a few light not working but you will get the idea.

All the letters are painted as is Tiger....
 
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[taybrynn]

My Dad standing next to the Holdman Star stand.  It was designed to be simple enough for one person to do, use tool-less assembly and collapses for easy storage and transport.

Once I showed my Dad the Holdman How-To page for his star ... it ignited an interest in doing this project.

We took the Holdman Design and engineered it for a saddle style mount onto the roofline (Holdman is perpendicular) and extended the star (mainly in the bottom) to a full 8' tall ... and it uses exactly 200 C9 bulbs and 3 channels.  Drilling the holes for the lowest bulbs required some special angling, since the space down there is very tight.

Its made out of welded rebar (painted black) and breaks down into 6 smaller pieces. Assembly involves putting rebar pieces into steel couplings and tightening down with bolts which are tightened w/ large washers cut in half and welded to hex nuts ... to adjust everything by hand.  There are guy wires to adjust the level as well, and those are also just simple hand turned giant butterfly screw adjustments.  We spend about 10 minutes setting it up the stand.  We put sandbags on the built-in sandbag holders (saddles) and they don't require attaching.  Carrying up the sandbags is the hardest part.  



You can see in the picture below that the stand had a cross bar and 4 hanging points (one lower one is not visble here).

When you walk the star up to the stand, you simply hang it on the top post, then it allows you to safely align with the other 3 posts quite easily.  Then you tighten each of the 4 attachment points with giant 1/3 wash butterfly bolts.   Its all very slick, but not many people would go to the trouble of custom welding all these parts together ... but for my Dad, that was the challenge and the fun part in designing and building it.  



Here is where I located the star originally in 12/2008.  I later moved it to a lower roof to help reduce the direct wind it would get, since the wind comes from the back of the house to the front 90% of the time, and the lower roof put the star top at about the same height at the upper roof.  I kind of miss this location, because it was much more spectacular there (higher, closer to the road) ... but it just worried me a lot.  I also combined houses with my neighbor to the left in 2009+ and moving the star over helped make it more in the center of the display.



This shows the location I've had it in for 2009 and 2010 shows.  It's just above the dual-path snowflake wall and I actually put the controllers next to the star base, and hook everything up there, since it eliminates a tons of cords from showing.  In this picture, I had a snarl of wires still stuck in the snowflake wall frame that I had not fixed yet.  Those are snowflakes in motion flakes, 24 of them in total, no longer sold.



If I were to put a hole in the middle, it would not be terribly big.  Maybe the size of soccer ball or smaller.

[Gary]

Thanks taybrynn. I can appreciate the amount of time you put into that reply. I did a fairly long detailed post in the past explaining the RJ45 connectors on my Aethers, and taking photos and labeling and explaining in a way that anybody would understand... and that took a long time (especially when you consider it's for somebody you've never met).

Anyways, I guess you have 400 lbs of sand to keep your star down? Looking at how your star is totally exposed to the wind (unlike the "original" Holdman star that sits "side-saddle", so it's bottom point sits lower on the roof) and would seem to have a high center of gravity, I'd be paranoid and would want do double that weight. Instead of sandbags, I've been collecting gallon-size milk jugs that I could carry into the roof empty, and fill them up with a garden hose up on the roof. I'd be designing the stand with the "saddle" portion to be 2 to 3 feet long in the front, and have it about 6 to 8 feet long in the back, and build a tray to hold about 50 jugs. 50 jugs would weigh about 400 pounds.

But I like the idea of the pre-built wireframe mentioned by mike2tall. My mount would have to be made of of wood as I'm better at working with wood (me using my dad's old welder would probably lead to disastrous results). I'd have to figure out how to connect the metal star frame onto the wood frame.