Pimp My Bob, The Tower

The Wakeboard.com Ride

The story starts with our move to a new riding location, away from our nice flat lake, to a rather more challenging location on the coast of England.

Buying a boat for the sea imposed a number of limitations we didn't have on our old lake, the new ride needed to be as seaworthy as possible but still able to put out a decent wake. We also had a limited budget within which to work (no brand new X-Star sadly).

After a long search we located a 2000 model Mastercraft 230 Sport, basically an X30 wihout the tower, bling and ballast... This was an ideal project boat to build apon with decent rough water handling and a sizable wake.

After tracking down a suitable base boat to become the Wakeboard.com Ride we made plans to uprate the original equipment to create our own X30. First up for improvement was the need for a tower, as the standard Maristar wasn't supplied with one when new. In this first article we will be covering purchasing and installing a new tower, stage 1 of Pimp My Bob!

Which Tower?

Looking on the net we found we had 3 options:

1. Generic tower (eg. Monster Tower)
2. Custom non-oem tower
3. Custom oem tower (e.g XTP)

Although I was perfectly happy with the Monster tower I had owned for my old boat I was keen to have a more custom look on the Masristar so looked at the oem and non-oem towers on offer.

The non-oem towers had a more modern style but I still liked the original Mastercraft style and wanted the best fit I could find so ended up choosing the XTP OEM tower. Sourcing and fitting the tower fell to our friends at Wakeboard Towers UK.

Mike from WTUK ordered the tower for me to arrive at the start of the 07 season so a few weeks ago a rather large pallet arrived at my door ready to be fitted.

Mike kindly offered to fit the tower so we loaded up his pickup with the tools and tower and went to the boatyard where Bob was waiting.

Step by Step Fitting

1) Unpacking

When unpacking it's well worth retaing the tube covering whilst you do the install.  You don't want to scratch your new tower!

Also, be carefull how you place the tower on the floor, the legs can easily get damaged.

2) Deck Prep

Preparing the deck is a simple task of taping(masking tape) the area where the legs go to reduce gelcoat scratches as you fit the tower.  It's better to overdo this bit as applying tape is easier than fixing gelcoat.

3) Trial Run

In order to work out the 4 drill points you need to place the tower on the boat.  Get at least 2 of you to lift the tower off of the pallet and onto the boat... this is the moment of truth.  Did they make the tower accurately and to the right pattern?

Phew, in my case the fit was spot on and we were happy to see we'd be able to drill all the holes easily and get to the back of the mount points with little or no obstruction.  This is the major benefit of using the OEM tower, it was designed with the exact hull/deck shape in mind.

4) Marking and Drilling

Once we had shuffled the tower into a spot that looked right we marked up the drill points and Mike took a large cutting tool to my boat!  At this stage you really need to take extra care when measuring the tower mounting points.  Take reference points and triangulate to get the fit good.  We had the added fun of the boat being wonky on the trailer... So we took triple measurements before powering up the drill.

One thing that may shock you when fitting the tower is how 'custom' each boat's hull and windscreen are.  e.g. on my boat the windscreen wasn't quite the same on both sides of the boat. The key thing to try to do is align the tower with the boat's hull as best as possible, and don't worry too much about getting everything 100 percent even, it might not actually be possible.

Once the four holes were cut it was a simple job of making rubber backing plates for the mounts and assembling the bolts, tower and plates.  Once finger tight we then toqued up the bolts.

With the tower now affixed to the boat we were on to the next stage... The reveal.

5) Reveal

This was simple and involved taking off the remaining packaging, standing back and admiring our handiwork.  Stage one of Pimp my Bob was complete... and what a transformation.  

The former ski boat was now blinged up and looked fantastic.  Massive thanks to Miike at Wakeboard Towers UK for supplying and fitting the core component in my DIY X30 project.

Conclusion

What a great purchase and tower.  We've tried it out and it works perfectly, giving a solid high pull point and extra style. Next up is the bimini, stay tuned...

Author:
Jeremy Nevill, www.wakeboard.com

Related Links:
Tower supply and fitting: Wakeboard Towers UK