bolting a tower back on, torque into the fiberglass and getting the racks to clear the bimini

i pull and reinstall a dozen towers a year at the marina for exactly your reason, garage doors. here is how i do it and nobody has come back with a leak yet.

torque. you are not really torquing into the fiberglass, you are clamping the deck between the tower foot and the backing plate, so the plate is what saves you. i run the 3/8 stainless to about 22 to 25 foot pounds, which is snug and no more. if there is no backing plate under a foot, stop and add one, a tower foot on bare cored deck will spider the gelcoat and then weep. the plate spreads the load.

bedding. i bed the foot on butyl tape, not 5200. butyl stays flexible, seals the bolt holes, and lets you take it apart in the fall without destroying the deck. 5200 is for things you never want to remove again, which a seasonal tower is not. a dab of anti seize on the stainless threads so they do not gall in the aluminum plate, and so they come out in march without a fight.

the racks and the bimini is a geometry problem and somebody with your exact boat will have the trick. mine is that i stow the bimini first, then fold the racks, and on some boats you have to swap to a rack with a tighter swivel. hold for the Tige owners.

mark your bolts before you ever pull the tower the first time. i put a paint pen line across each foot and onto the deck so it goes back in the exact rotational spot, and i number the feet one through four with tape. a tower that goes back a few degrees off will fight you on the last bolt and you will be tempted to wallow the hole out, which is how a good tower turns into a leaky one.

and label your bolt bag by foot. the front and rear bolts on a lot of these are different lengths and putting a long bolt in a short hole bottoms it out on the plate and feels tight when it is doing nothing.

different brand but same door problem, my Enzo tower folds instead of coming off, and i will say the folding tower is worth asking about if you are ever shopping. mine drops forward with two gas struts and one pin per side and it clears a 7 foot door with the trailer. no bolts to bed, no backing plate to worry about, just two pins and two struts to keep an eye on.

the downside is the struts are a wear item and a weak strut lets a heavy tower come down faster than you want, so i replace them in pairs before they get tired. if i were buying again i would weigh a folding tower pretty heavily just for the garage, but a bolt down tower that comes off cleanly like reed described is fine too.

one cold weather warning on butyl since reed brought it up, and he is right about using it. butyl in january in an unheated garage is a brick. if you reinstall a tower in the cold, warm the tape in your pocket or near a heater first or it will not squish down and seal. i learned that bolting a bimini bracket back on in a 20 degree garage and had to pull it and do it over when it warmed up and the tape finally flowed.

and torque everything a second time a week later in the spring after the first warm day. bedding settles, bolts relax a touch, and a re check catches the one that backed off before it rattles all season.

i do not have a Tige but on my Malibu the rack and bimini fight was solved by a shorter rack arm, not by folding anything. the factory published the tower and rack part numbers and the torque values in the owner material, and the manufacturer homepage is where i finally found mine, at malibuboats.com, under the owner resources. worth checking whether Tige lists a low profile or close swivel rack that clears a stowed bimini, because that is a 150 dollar part instead of a whole new routine every time you load up.

the other trick nobody mentioned, stow the boards fins in, grips out, and alternate them so they nest. two boards that fight the bimini one way will clear it flipped. small thing but it saved me from pulling boards every trip.