MD 180 Broken Mast

[ful-rac]

Here's something that's worth posting about....

Was out fishing this weekend and broke another mast, this time on my MD180. I always carry spare parts and tools with me but unfortunately since I upgraded to the newer style drive my spare parts don't fit the new drive minus the drive cables. In this case spare parts would have done me no good as the threaded portion of the mast snapped off inside the sprocket. On the older versions of the Mirage Drive you could just swap out the sprocket on the water with not too much difficulty. With the newer style drive you can't really do that. The correct way to fix this problem would be the warranty route, in that case I would have had to replace the entire spine, which includes the entire mechanism and sprockets and what not, and also waiting a couple of weeks to process.

A couple weeks without my drive...? No... that will not do...

So this is how I was able to fix it up!

Here is the moment I confirmed my broken mast! DAMN! It's going to be a looooonnnng paddle back...




Yep...




So on the way home, I gave Andy a call at OEX Sunset Beach. I told him about my broken mast and asked if he had a replacement mast available....and he did! While I was there I noticed that the broken mast that came off of the drive was in fact not the correct turbo fin mast but was the standard size st mast, which is at least an 1.5 or 2"s, short. I bought the drive new with the turbo fins installed too. I guess it was a mix-up at the factory...In any case I walked out the door with 2 new masts and a new project.



Broken fin removed from the drive.



Here was the task at hand...1/2" of broken mast at the bottom of this hole. UGH!



Here are the tools I used to get the broken mast out.

And the procedure was to center punch the broken piece as close to center as possible...check. Start drilling with a smaller sized drill bit and drill thru the broken piece....check. Step up the size of the drill bit to fit the size of the easy out....check. Insert easy out into correct sized hole and back broken piece out. Check.



Here it comes!



Close up.


Voila!



New masts from Andy, screwed right into place!



Back in Business!




Thanks Andy for the spare parts, as you can see everything worked out just fine .