First off, I've got no pictures right now. Second, I didn't take the time to take pictures during the process. Third, I hope none of you have to mount or remount a tower.
The deal with mine was that the upper portion of the tower was not built right, so the tower top is warped like the SX in the 2001 brochure. As it turns out, nothing can be done to correct that without major surgery (with cutting torches, etc.) The good news is that it's cosmetic, and therefore less important than the other defects. One important flaw of the upper portion was that it is in the neighborhood of 2-3" too narrow across the beam. The impact of this comes into play when joining the top to installed bases or an assembled tower onto the hull.
Jeff Dorge, my Toyota Marine rep (who has really impressed me) suggested that the proper way to mount a Toyota tower is to assemble the three pieces and then move the thing around the boat until the front pads fit as well as they can. At that point, you mark and drill the inboard holes on the forward mounts. After that, it's gravy. The good thing about this approach is that the tower will be installed without any added stresses.
Unfortunately, this approach did not work with a tower as twisted as mine. After several hours of trying to get the thing squared away, I dissassembled the tower, grabbed one base and moved it until the forward pad fit pretty damn good. Incidentally, the aft pads were then out of alignment with the hull surface, but I knew they could be sucked down. I drilled one hole forward, then one hole aft, then the remaining two up front, then the rear. I bought regular Home Depot zinc hardware because of its superior strength for temporary installation.
For the rear areas, I cut two pieces each of some 9-ply (non-marine) birch plywood I had. The two pieces were of different size so as to better match the inside of the hull back there. I glued the two together with wood glue, clamped them and had a few smoke breaks.
Once all holes were drilled, hardware test fit, etc, I prepared a special brew formally called splooge - laminating epoxy mixed with milled glass fibers. With a sufficiently high glass content, this stuff cures into a glob with incredible compressive strength. I mixed two batches of splooge and applied it to both fore and aft tower pads and a liberal amount to the plywood backing plate. After placing the tower base up on the boat, and the backing plates in the gunwhale, I cranked the stuff down without hesitation (hence the zinc hardware - don't have to worry about stripping stainless threads or bending/breaking the bolts.)
This may sound stupid to 1) glue the tower to the hull, and 2) worry about it in the first place. As it turns out, I'm real happy with it and would do it again. The new mounting locations are better, but with a form-fitting splooge layer between aluminum and gelcoat, I think there is just no way the stress cracks will return - how could they, there are no stress concentrations! The tower is now, in effect, part of the boat. I doubt the slooge-to-gelcoat bond is very strong, but that's okay; I simply wanted the ultimate form-fitting pad.
The splooge holding the backing plates both bonds to the wood and bonds to and fills the texture of the fabric exposed in the gunwhale. Only then are they through-bolted to the tower. That crap is nice and solid now as well.
I repeated this process on the other side and then went to bed (4AM). My fear was that I really had placed the bases on the boat without any regard to how the upper portion was going to fit. If the locations were bad, it'd be just horrible. The best I could do was to get them to fit well and ensure they were square to eachother and the boat.
The next afternoon, I got the tower up there, bolted and pinned the stbd side fully. We needed to spread the tower two full inches, but it went very smoothly. Once cranked down, I could tell the assemnbly was more rigid than before the remount. No creaking sounds during the stretch, but I know it did flex the hull because the windshield supports now need to be tightened.
The plan is to replace the zinc stuff with stainless one-by-one now that the pads are down. Stainless should hold more than it can crank down on its own. There was no room to reinforce the forward areas with backing plates, but the hull is thick right there. I did trim some fiberglass out of the way to ensure the most important bolts had flat surfaces to bear on.
In a nutshell, the tower feet had been so ill-mounted that they should have been cracking more than they had. When a pad with say 15 square inches of area rests on a total of one inch of contact area...cracks will happen sooner than later. A layer of rubber padding would've only spread that stress out the tiniest bit. We've now got the full 15 spreading the load.
When I removed the tower, the bases had about a half inch of play in them - to prevent strewss cracks, the dealer had just refrained from tightening down some of the bolts - the force required to spread the top was enough to make it seem like the tower was rigidly mounted.
With the splooge, a good fit and tight bolts, these things aqre truly solid now. The bases are square, and the rear points are reinforced. No, there was no aluminum anywhere near the four pads. Must not have done that until later in the 2000 model year with the S22s.
A ton of work, all of which had to be done before we could have the bimini installed, and without a bimini, you don't spend much time at Havasu.
All is good with the tower (structurally speaking).
