Many harbors across the country fly flags. A nautical flagpole is a typical flagpole you'll find at these water front areas. Nautical flagpoles offer a way to display multiple flags and visually fit well with the mast heads of the marina sailing ships. Being able to fly multiple flags allowed harbors to fly various signal flags. Signal flags were a great way to communicate between sailors and harbors before modern technology. Today they are a great international tradition.
In this case, we are at the Belmont Harbor in Chicago Illinois. These are standard steel external flagpoles. Recently, the flagpoles were vandalized and the flags were stolen. We were called to retro fit these steel flagpoles with aluminum cleat cover boxes. If you have security issues with your external flagpole, a cleat cover box is the way to go.
There are two things to keep in mind when you are selecting/installing a cleat cover box. The first is the diameter of the flagpole. There are different size cleat cover boxes designed to lay flush with any diameter flagpole. And secondly, you may need to cut down your halyard as space can get pretty tight in the cleat cover box.
Cleat cover boxes come with extra long stainless steel screws. The box, as well as the screws match the existing standard cast aluminum cleat screw of 1/4"-20NC. This means you can use these existing pilot holes for the standard aluminum flagpole (no drilling required). As far as maintenance goes, this is one of the easiest things to install.
The steel pole had welded cleats which would not work with the cleat cover box. The welded steel cleats were left alone and on the opposite side, pilot holes were drilled. The cover boxes were mounted and all we had to do was raise the flags. Unfortunately, we noticed the trees had overgrown the flag display. We had only come with the previous size City of Chicago flag. We put up both the US flag and the Illinois State flag then headed home in the misty rain for a smaller size City flag.
