Replacing oem tower on older 242s with folding tower

[Jayme]

As I'm looking for an older 242 or 230 I'm realizing I would need to replace most of the towers with a non factory folding tower as I'm looking to stir in my garage and door only has height of about 9'6". How hard would this be to do? Would the factory fittings match up with after market towers?

 

[brockhals]

You may be able to modify the towers to fold, rather than replacing them. I believe I've seen videos of it being done

 

[CDENsomnia]

Take it from someone who swapped towers. Its not worth the heartache. You will have to remove the old tower then have the holes filled by a good fiberglass shop or bodyshop. They wont blend exactly no matter what. I ended up covering the patches with seadek but the holes on the side that were patched you can see in the sun.

Then getting a new tower is tricky...I had a professional come install and I asked before I had the tower installed if I would be able to collapse one way or the other so its below the height of the garage. I got an "Oh yeah!, it will be easy". When they were done I said so how do I collapse the tower? They said just take the bimini off frame (not easy at all) and fold the tower backwards on to the swim deck. I tried it, mounting points and the shape of the hull prevents that from happening so I remove the tower every off season to get it in the garage. Its very heavy and not a lot of fun but it gets us by.

Also, not sure if anyone has had better experiences but I would recommend not using Aerial. They were not very good and the quality of everything is not the greatest either. If I had to do it over again I would sacrifice the cool factor of my aftermarket tower and go with a monster tower that is ugly but extremely functional when it collapses. On my old SX230 that came with a monster tower from the previous owner it was very solid, well built, collapsed below the windshield and allowed us to use the factory mooring cover. Oh yeah and I had to get to a upholstery shop to modify my mooring cover to fit the new tower. Now in the summer I have a cockpit and bow cover I use so the tower isn't an issue.

Love the way it looks but man it was a pain!

 

[Jayme]

OK so what years/models are the collapsible towers standard on 242s? I have the model comparison chart from this forum but I don't believe the foldable tower is one of the items...

 

[CDENsomnia]

I might be wrong but with the 242 towers collapsing doesn't buy you a lot of height. Maybe its just the X that has that problem though. Pretty much every tower since like 2012 collapses in the 24 footers. Again, be careful because collapsing doesn't always buy you the height you need to get under a short garage header.

 

[Wisefam22]

I have an aerial tower on my sx230 that came with boat. I remove 2 screws in front bimini support and 2 screws at top of side arm for tower and folds down almost flat with top window. Idk height of my garage but it takes all of 5min to drop the tower for me to back her into bed.