• • Internal Crank- This is a pole that has a winch with an access door to do repairs but for the most part you raise and lower the flag using a hand crank supplied that you stick into the side of the pole and turn to raise and lower.  Anyone with the crank which they are all the same can lower and raise the flag.
• • Internal M-winch- This one is similar to the internal crank but it requires a key to open a little keyhole door to stick the crank in and then you can proceed to raise and lower the flag. The big difference is the requirement of a key to be able to use the crank supplied. Both of these methods use bare cable that goes into the flagpole.  No rope although bare cable is sometimes referred to a wire rope.
• • Internal Rope with Jam Cleat- This one is similar to the internal crank in that it has an access door but when you open the door there is a jam cleat that is holding the rope inside and it catches the rope in a one way manner so that when you pull and raise the flag it locks in place. to lower the flag you have to release the cleat so that the flag can be lowered. All this is happening inside the pole. Since its rope it is more likely to tear but even cable can eventually tear too.  This one if you are not careful and let go of the rope when the cleat is not engaged the flag can come down and hit you hard.  All flags that have internal parts have 3-7 lbs weights on then to help lower then down.

  Now the other type of pole is an external pole which is what most of us know.  It has a rope that does a big loop from a pulley at the top and we can raise and lower the flag by feeding the rope up or down as desired.  This leaves the rope completely exposed and if some evil person wants to they can come up and cut the rope with some scissors or a knife with ease.  Don’t worry even though these are the most common types of flagpole because they are generally the easiest to maintain and have the least amount of problems and there is a number of solutions to protect your rope.

• • Wire core rope and lock-  The simplest but least effective is to get a rope that has a wire core inside. You can read about that in the rope section of this web site.  With this you can tie the rope in a specific way so that you can put a pad lock on it while its tied up so that nobody can just walk up to the pole, lower the flag and take it.  With the wire core its going to take more than just a knife or scissors to cut it as well.
• • Raise the Cleat- this method is as simple as it is described.  You mount the cleat high enough above the ground so that it takes a ladder to get to the rope thus making it a little more hard to get to the rope than just walking up to it.  That just means that you will need to bring out a ladder every time as well to raise and lower the flag.  If you leave the flag up 24/7 then that might not be an issue.
• • Lock Box and Channel- This is by far the best solution for an external pole.  The is a box at the cleat with a locking mechanism to prevent access to the rope.  This alone works but you can still get to the rope and cut it if you bring the right tools.  If you add a rope channel that extends up then the rope is no longer accessible for the length of the channel 5-10 feet unless again you bring a ladder and cut it above the channel.

All these methods for the external poles can be combined or just used on their own. You could raise the cleat and put a lox box on it with wire core rope and a 10 foot channel.  That would make it next to impossible to reach but that is a little much.  If you have a nice 20 foot flag that is valued at over $1500 and theft is a huge problem then that would be a good option though.  That is for you to decide and place a value on.  Whatever you decide or thinking about please fell free to ask questions about it.  Even if you found us and we are not in your service area or you want to try to install it yourself and not use our services we are hear to help.  Click here for our contact info.

Quick video of how a lock box and channel work.