Where did I go wrong?

[sperold]

Tried fixing my power antennae, and failed miserably.
Took it out of the car as I had to install a replacement fender. I put penetrating oil all over the mast section and left it for a few days, but that section would not come out (by pulling on the mast). I pulled so hard, I managed to pull the tube that goes in the motor case out.... which just made matters worse. Working on just the tube now, I improvised a slide hammer device that finally got the mast and little quill or spacer shim (goes around mast and is shaped like a barrel) out.
The mast that I bought on E-bay (listed for 90 to 95 which may have been part of the problem) was a bit smaller than the mast I removed, but if I used the original quill, which was pretty mangled, it fit well, but would not anchor.

Another observation, since it was out, I decided to see how it all worked, and took the whole assembly apart.
By removing the motor that has the little worm gear, you can feed the toothed plastic mast piece into the unit and force it to wind up in the plactic accumulator (that is pretty well the first thing that comes off when disassembling).

The plastic tooth thing snagged on the first bend, I took it apart to see the issue and could not imagine how it would solve itself. I helped the plastic rope thing past this point and it wound up easily into the accumulator. I imagined that if you severely bent the tip of the toothed rope (towards the toothed side) that you may get lucky and get past that first snag..... but I have never heard anyone mention that before.

So now I have an assembled gen1 power ariel that does not have the base of the mast anchored in the unit.

Not as easy as I thought.

Has anyone actually done this and gotten better results, if you have, do you have any advice?

 

[Toolman]

Never done anything other than replace the entire assembly, which went smoothly. No help I can offer.

 

[luigisho]

I've had hit and miss luck with yanking the old mast out and feeding in a new one. Worked on my '90 when I did it like 10 years ago. On my '94, I wound up getting a used whole unit after I *****'d up removing the mast last summer. Check out ebay and the classifieds here and get a working unit.

 

[sperold]

I kept at it and came to some more conclusions.
The nut on the top of the aluminum tube keeps the antennae from going out too far, so that part is ok (once you have the nice new quill or barrel shim that has a mushroom top). The mushroom top is too big to get past the nut when the Ariel is being extended out.
I laced together the old barrel quill (that I think is part of the aluminum tube) and the end of my new barrel quill that I mentioned above. There are slits in each barrel quill which form a tab, so I joined the tabs into the open slits and the tabs take up some room and make the mast stable in the aluminum tube.
Now when I force the mast down (when the motor and worm gear are removed) it bottoms out; so that looks after the antenna when the mast is being retracted.
This may be the answer, but I will not know until I install it in the summer.