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G3 Tower Shake


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How much should the tower shake at cruising speeds ~35mph? I have a 2014 VLX with the G3 Tower. It's loaded up with 4 wakeboards and 1 surfboard, 4 Titan Speakers and the bimini open. All of the bolts are tight. Is it normal for the tower to shake? Should I worry about gel coat cracking? Thanks for your feedback.

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Mine shook some with the 4 Titans and all 4 racks loaded, but not disturbingly so. With 2 Rev-10s there is slightly more weight, but not any more shake in my estimation. I did tighten up the upper Allen bolts and it reduced some of the squeeking where both hoops join together. I rarely if ever run 35 mph so that may be why I am not experiencing what you may be. You can check the nuts that hold the tower base to the underside of the gunnels, but I doubt that will cure the upper tower shake. Barring some loose fasteners, you may just have to slow down a couple mph until you find a happy cruise speed.

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We have the g3. 2. with the new latches, 3 sets of xm9's, board racks, and Bimini. Ou tower shakes pretty bad! We are on a choppy lake but never had good luck with the last 2 g3 towers on our last boat. I even had the metal wear away were the pinch point meets and when it gets wet the aluminum gets on our seats. My fix was to put thin piece of rubber between the pitch point and it solves the wear problem.

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It is all side to side movement... maybe 1 inch total. I don't really notice it near the base, but up high you can definitely tell on a choppy/windy day. It seems more like things are flexing rather than a loose bolt, but I'll double check this weekend.

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It's the nature of anything that spans that much distance, carries that much weight and is put under that much stress. (unlike older towers it only connects to the boat in 2 spots) One trick is to push up on the front of the tower while you tighten the bolts. That will really help the 'north and south' movement. The left, right is just flexing in it. The only way to really fix that is to build a tank of a tower like the G4 with honeycomb internals, more material in key spots, and slightly better geometry.

That being said the G3 is a great tower and failure rate is almost non-existant to my knowledge.

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If you are getting that much metal to metal contact at the base of the tower you may want to adjust the heim joints at the pivot points inside of the 3" tube outward a turn or two to open that gap and stop "some" of the contact. I do have metal to metal contact, but it has never created shavings or dust and you can hardly tell where there is contact inside of the channel on top of the base. That would make me nuts seeing the shavings after every outing! I do have the G3 tower knobs so that may help some.

Edited by wdr
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It is all side to side movement... maybe 1 inch total. I don't really notice it near the base, but up high you can definitely tell on a choppy/windy day. It seems more like things are flexing rather than a loose bolt, but I'll double check this weekend.

Every tower will flex a little on a windy, choppy day. Its a wide span with weight on it. Good test is when boat is not under way to swing from your hoop, it should be rock solid. I weigh 200 lbs and I can't budge it. If you have movement from this then I would say something is not normal. I have had three G3 towers and all of them have been solid on the water.

As long as your knobs are tight it should not be a problem. You can tighten your knobs with an allen wrench which will help tighten them up and keep them from coming loose.

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Hand tight with the knobs, or are you using the Allen wrench to torque down? Aldo what kind of movement? Side to side or front/back?

One of the knobs on my G3 fell off yesterday. Fortunately it fell into the boat and not into the river. It must have been coming loose for some time. I learned a lesson - periodically check the bolts/knobs. Even with that, I never noticed the tower moving at all.

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lucky^^^^

Yeah the 1st, 2nd time out i noticed some movement in the tower, we were just hand tightening the knobs, once i fount the Malibu allen wrench problem solved

Edited by Stevo
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