28te radar arch removal

[Jforesta]

I am going to remove the radar arch from my 28 and replace it with a tapered radar mast.
Has anyone out there done this? If so, can you share your experience. Any photos would be apriciated.
Joe

[djpeewee]

Joe,

We removed the factory arch because we trailer our boat often and the height of the arch with the radar on top was too high. We nearly ripped the brand new radome off the boat on a low hanging cable TV wire.

We designed ours and had a local welder fabricate it for us because we couldn't find any decent folding masts. Once it was built we had a local powder coating company put the white on it.

When it is up, the mast is about 41 inches above the roof. When it is down, it is only 5 inches above the roof. It really solved the problem with being too tall for trailering.

Removing the old arch was very straight forward. There are a few cables that feed through one of the starboard side tubes and down into the wheel house behind the triangular shaped Starboard panel just behind the helm chair.

I ran the cables to the new mast through the space above the side windows, and around the front where the windshield wiper wiring is. The center windshield wiper access plate has a cableway that goes aft to the wheel house dome light. You can use this cableway to get far enough aft to poke the cables up through the roof and into the location of the new mast. Everything is nice and hidden. The base of the mast is bolted through the roof in 8 places - 4 inside the cabin, and 4 on the outside in front of the pilot house. This allows the weight to be distributed along the bulkhead that the front windshield is mounted in. The mounting hardware matches the roof hand rail hardware so it looks factory installed from the inside.

To cover the old arch mounting locations, I made two blanking plates out of 3/16" starboard, sealed them with Sikaflex, and fastened them with screws.

Here's a couple of pictures of what we ended up with:

Shilshole.jpg

Profile.jpg

Mast Up.jpg

Mast Down.jpg

I can send some more detailed pictures if you like as these are all I have on my phone at the moment.

So far we love the look of the new mast and don't have to worry about losing our radome while towing any longer. I will be removing it this winter however. We didn't plan well enough for fitting our 10' 6" inflatable on the roof. The pontoons are a little too big to slide under the light arms on the mast. We are going to get the arms moved up by about 4 inches, and then the dinghy will sit nicely on the roof. It'll go back for powder coating and then back on the boat.