Building your own boat tower with a tig welder...

So, instead of buying a Titan I or a Monster tower, by friend is trying to convince me that he can build me a nicer tower for cheaper.

A Titan I predrilled and wired for 1 pair of speakers with 2 Titan Low Rider racks would cost me $1800 on wakeside.com.

My friend is instead trying to get me to buy him a tig welder for $1000, pay $200 in metal/parts, $100 for paint and he'll supposedly build me a tower nicer looking than the Titan III. I guess he'd drill the tower for boat speakers and run the speaker wires for free.

So, if he builds me a great tower and I'm happy with it, I get a great tower for a good price and he gets a tig welder to keep.

My friend very little to no experience welding as far as I know. He has used a mig welder before (I think to make some part for his car) but has never used a tig welder or blow torch.

Now, this is a smart guy who just graduated with a bachelor's in Electrical Engineering. And he's pretty good with his hands and knows a lot about car mechanics. He has basically rebuilt the engine in his Nissan 240SX and has really *****' rigged up his car.

Can this fellow be trusted to build me a tower better than a Titan I or Monster?

He has also commented that if this tower ends up working out great, he will start building towers on the side and sell them for $700 to wakeboarders who are currently paying $1200 for overpriced towers. He may even decide to give me a cut of the profits if it works out.

He says that if the tower, which he can have ready in 1 month, is not satisfactory, he will pay me back $100% for the cost of the tig welder. I guess I'd eat the cost of the metal/parts and the paint.


What do you guys think? This is an absurd proposition? Or is welding actually quite easy and is this an easy way for me to save some money?

Here's a picture of my friend, by the way:




(Message edited by blueplastic on June 11, 2005)

eh... buy the titan I you'll have it sooner, and its tested and true. If his tower fails it could very well damage your boat

TIG welding takes quite a bit of practice too. It's not anything like MIG welding, but that's not to say it couldn't be done. For someone who has no TIG welding experience or has ever built a tower, you could see how things could possibly go.

I would have to say that if he has already rigged his car, then there would be no reason to rust him to Tig weld you a tower. Tig welding is no joke, mig can be done by most anyone, but you may want to ask him to cut you a check ahead of time to cover the costs in case he refuses to pay up later.

Hows he going to bend the tubes? Your tower will look cheesy with joints on the corners instead of curved pipes.

Just do yourself a favor and buy a completed one.
At least you'll keep a friend.

No f'ing way! save everybody the time and money and get a titan. tig welding is no joke and by the look of confusion on your friends face i doubt he can pull it off.

Building your own tower is just silly unless you already have the gear and expertise. Even then, its probably still silly from a liability/appreciation standpoint.

Its hard work.
Its likely to be crap and dangerous.
Its will depreciate your boat vs appreciate.
Its a serious liability.

My buddy and I built our first tower. We made a jig for bending the corners. The only hard part was fabricating the mounts. Worked good, still around today,but we now board behind my boat with an illusion X. We already had the welder, ended up about $250. I say Go for it! At least you will have a welder!

I built my first tower (because my dad owns a welding shop) and it looked outdated. I put it on a 1995 prostar 190 so it matched the boat and didn't look to bad. If you have a newer boat it will look bad no matter how good your friend is.

Here's a pic

Is your friend a structural engineer? Does he know how to determine how much strength each weld needs and how much to weld? I can make metals stick and even look good, but I wouldnt even consider building a tower (and I took 2 years of welding in school). Go with a store bought tower-at least that way if you break it somehow, the mfg would replace it.

i say let him go for it!!!! if i lived closer to my dad and some of his nice tools i would build me one too! it cna be done. just think monster and titan and everyone else who makes a tower is somebody just like your friend and started out just like him. cut the guy some slack and help him out and i bet you'd have a bad a$$ final product!!!something similar to tylers on that mc would get the job done for sure. a lot of people are just afraid and want to throw there money down the tubes. they are also the same people who pay others to work on their cars!!! if i was rich i would still do my own maintenance. ok my .0000000222 good luck

I think it would be too much of a liability issue. What if the tower breaks collapses and injures someone? Is your insurance going to cover a homemade tower?!? I doubt it! Yes, other tower companies started out small just like alot of companies do. But if you want to start fabricating towers, go through the proper steps to do it. Like training in welding. Alot if training!! We're not talking about welding a fence or something like that, we're talking about a cage that goes over people with a rope attached that at times can have alot of tension at 23 miles an hour. Then, if you really are wanting to start a tower company, do testing! R&D. That's one of the reasons other towers cost more. Another reason is they have insurance!! A major cost in doing business. So, I'm not against you guys wanting to make money by selling towers, but please just do it the right way.

My biggest issue here is liability if someone gets hurt. Think about it...... Seriously, think about it! Run some "What if's" in your head. There's a reason towers cost what they cost.

P.S. I bet you'll spend more than $200 in aluminum and parts!

I'd say if you're good friends with the guy then dont let him build you a tower. It takes a "little more" than having a tig machine and and some mig welding experience. The two processes are actually quite different. Ideally you want to have a shop that you can park the boat in and take numbers, build jigs, and have bending brakes, porta band, and tools for fabrication. Price out some of that aircraft aluminum and think about how many times your buddy botches a measurement that costs you a critical piece of pipe. Dude just nut up and buy one. Plenty of aftermarket tower builders that you can buy from that would keep you @ about 1200 or so. You'll have enough fun mounting a tower that you buy!

Sameer, don't do it. It will end up looking like a swingset and probably break when you are doing your first suicide Raley. Buy the Epic tower that Breakawaydayze is gonna sell on epicmarine.com. You can get it cheaper and it will fit where your factory reinforcement plates are.

In addition to all of the other stuff people have mentioned, realize that $1000 is a rip off for the labor. You could get it done for half that by people who actually know what they are doing.

Ya I agree, why does he need a tig? Just use stainless steel and use a mig welder.

How much is he charging you for the tube bender? Don't tell me he's gonna fill them with sand & heat them. If he cannot bend the tubes, no way will it look nicer than a Titan III.

Your friend looks like an insurance salesman.

lol, i agree, looks like some sorta salesman. Don't do it man. Get a blemished model joystick tower, I paid 499.95 for mine and it's been great. Looks good too. Alot better than a homemade that I've seen around the rivers here.

http://forums.wakeboarder.com/viewtopic.php?t=24882&highlight=

Check out that link. Me and a friend built my tower from scratch. I think we spent around $200 bucks, maybe less. I already had a Miller Dialarc 250 arc welder, though. I stick welded it.

I would love to build one out of stainless and TIG weld it since that is part of what I do for a living now. I do a lot of TIG welding for industrial plants (mostly food processing plants) and it is not something that just anyone can do. I have known certified welders that were excellent at MIG and Stick welding that couldn't TIG weld worth a damn. If they practiced a lot, of course they could become good at it, but not without practice. At the time I built this tower, I didn't have access to a good TIG welder or the $$$.

As for your deal, I would not do it. TIG welding takes a lot of skill and practice. It is not like MIG welding. Once a MIG welder is set up right, a monkey can weld with it. TIG and MIG are two totally different animals.

Your "friend" is going to come out smelling like roses on this deal. He's going to get a welding machine out of this and you will probably get a half assed tower.

Since your in Orlando call up BULLET TOWER COMPANY. They do great work and will do the install for you....407-342-2893

me and my buddy and friends that have their own welding shop built to awesome towers on our own. we used mounts that we bought from raul at precision metat machining.(without good mounts the tower will look cheap and the mounts do take some of the torque. we found out stainless steel does not bend very easily. aluminum is a little tuff to bend. we finally used an electric powered conduit bender with dies as close to size aluminum we were useing. the first tower we built a model out of scrap metal before we started to use the $200 worth of aluminum. 4 of us then spent 12hours building our first tower. it was mig welded together. a couple welds were tigged and then we realized a really nice bead looks just as well from mig and much quicker and easier. this task is not a real easyone and after paying my 2 buddies, price of mounts and aluminum it still cost me a 1000 cad. another tower i built before we built out of 2" exhaust tubing bent at a muffler shop with fixed mounts.( glass spidered around mounts) (looked a little cheese compared to second one) the guys on here might be giving you good advice and going with a lower priced retail model. the guys that helped me build both towers were very experience welders and machinists

not a chance in hell. dont even consider it. id perhaps punch him in the lip for being such and idiot.
you need a pipe bender, argon gas tanks, and mounting hardward. this thing is gonna run well over the price of a new tower and youre gonna go thru alot of materials before you have a decent looking tower.
i built my first tower with a stick welder and 3/4 galvanized steel from home depot. cost about 100 bucks and worked great. (pics at diy tower.com. either go this route or save up and buy a tower.

Tig and mig are way different. Plus, i would think most parts of a tower would be better mig'd or arc welded anyways.

I remembered seeing a home-made tower a while back that look like a streteched Flight-Control Tower. It looked very similar except it was just taller.

capital D capital 0 capital N capital T, don't do it......Had a friend once who's head was chopped off by the top of a tower with too much torque being applied by the Centrifugal force of the anatomical pull of the apparatus of the circumference of E=MC2. In other words...if you don't know and practice engineering, don't screw with the laws of it. Otherwise it's likely to be a cluster f$#% and get somebody hurt.

I'd always thought that TIG welding was specifically for making smaller welds that held strong enough, but were more for being able to grind smooth and paint than for pure strength. I'd take a MIG welded tower anyday, for pure durability and the fact that a MIG weld done right and powdercoated doesn't look bad at all.

A guy i know built his own tower...looks pretty damned good.

Umm Tig is the best of the best, it's used where welds need to be very strong and look very nice, most often times the welds are left as it, as they look so nice, but it takes much more skill then a mig. Mig is just as strong and sturdy and will still look nice, but not as nice as tig welded stuff.

Hey I want an xstar but don't want to spend the cash so my friend tells me if I buy him enough glass, resin and bondo he will make me an xstar hull for a lot less.

He has bodged up his honda civic with a badd ass bodykit so I'm sure he could do it even though he has no experience of laminating.

I'd post a picture of him but I don't have one to hand right now.....

jay, that is funny

Ya, why the picture anyway?

As if that is going to make us say "don't do it, he looks like a knuckle head"

i guess it wouldn't bother me if he had some experience with the TIG. still a lot of issues to work out in my opinion. He needs to consider the $1000+, you would spending on equipment.. then materials. I'm the DIY type so building something like whats on the centurion doesn't seem too far out of reach. This sounds like you could get a nice chunk of change sunk into your friends idea, and the Titan I would start to sound like a GREAT idea.

I'll join in....

If you haven't seen any pipe related welding/fabricating that he has done, then I would say that it is a big gamble.

The welding is the easy part. It is getting all the pieces cut to the right lenght, bent at the right spots and notched to fit that are the hard parts.

It takes some pretty special and heavy duty equipment to accurately bend 2" pipe. If you don't do it right it either kinks or the wall thinkness on the outside radius becomes too thin. A standard tool for this kind of work is the "notcher" that puts the proper semi-circle at the end of the pipe so that it matches up to the side of another pipe. (while it is possible to do this with a cutting torch, you have to be very very careful!).

How does he intend to fabricate the hinges? Does he have a machine shop available? Or is the tower not going to fold down?

You could end up with a nice, inexpensive tower. You could also end up nothing at all, or worse, an ugly tower that could potentially be unsafe.

I would go with the bird in hand and buy the tower.

Have this guy build you one and pay him a couple hundred bucks!

Impressive!
http://www.wakeworld.com/MB/Discus/messages/3183/234256.html?1118765929

If your buddy decides to build and sell towers, he better remember to pay Correct Craft the royalty fee on the patent. Ask many other tower builders how they fared with that one...

In all honesty, I would not do it. You pay $1300 for an unproven tower with no board racks, versus $1800 for a proven design and company that has liability insurance AND get board racks. Not sure what the Monster tower costs with Racks, but it would likewise be in the same cost area.

If he already had the welder and it cost $300-$400, it might be worth the gamble.

It can be done, here is my $100 tower. Got a deal on the tubing for $65, stainless hardware was another $35. I mounted it tonight, used large backing plates on the inside of the hull, and rubber pads between top deck and tower.

It fits perfect and is very stiff. I am getting ready to paint the tower and the boat. Tell Correct Craft the check is the mail.
yeah right

Also it took 1 full day, and 1 evening to build.