Re: home made guide posts
I made a set after looking at 'store bought' ones. <br /><br />The upright part is just ABS pipe. This is what the 'store bought' pipes often are. I use the heaviest, strongest black ones, I think it's 4 inch ID. A lot of commercial ones use white pipe with regular old ABS pipe end caps. <br /><br />I have a pretty heavy 21X6 foot welded aluminum river boat with a big V6 outboard. It's amazing to me the stress these ABS pipes will take when loading in a swift current and/or wind. <br /><br />The pipe slips over a metal bracket. They are a piece of 1 - 1.5 inch galvanized channel material (I'm thinking - not at home to actually look at mine) that are hollow, square cross section, about a foot or two on each dimension. The bend is not 90 degrees - angled to approximate the angle of the hull. I've seen some that are welded to this angle, but most I've seen are bent.<br /><br />The horizontal leg of the bracket gets attached to the trailer frame with appropriate sized square U-bolts and fittings. They can be slid in and out to adjust for the width of the boat. They can be put above or below the trailer frame depending on need.<br /><br />If you can imagine or look at the brackets that are used for side bunk-style guide-ons - the type of ABS guide-on I'm talking about uses exactly the same bracket. I discovered this looking at a set at the local boat shop - they were exactly like my commercially made side bunk brackets.<br /><br />In fact, rather than fabricating, I just bought two of these side bunk brackets and U-bolts from a local boat shop. That way all the drilled holes, etc. are fully galvanized, which the local fabricating shop couldn't do anyway, and I didn't have to hunt up the U Bolts.<br /><br />The ABS pipe slips over the vertical leg of the bracket. The diameter of the pipe is selected to slide over the bracket and loose enough to be able to rotate. length is cut to accomidate the height of the gunwales, when the trailer is submerged. So they'll be higher than the gunwales. Cut it long, you can always cut it down after you figure out what works for your boat and typical loading scenario. They are capped a the top end, but you need air holes in them so they don't fill with air and float off the bracket/post when submerged.<br /><br />Hope this helps.
....At least I took the outboard off
